Blood and Steel
by Cobray
Summary: Last update: 26th May. They all go out wanting to be heroes. They all go out wanting to be legends. Some are lucky enough to come back with riches and glory. Others are lucky to come back at all. But all of them come back changed.
1. A Heart of Flame

Sometimes I wonder why they come here.

Maybe it's because we're the closest pub for twenty miles once you leave the capital. I know they have boozers up in Stormwind but I've made deliveries and none of them are ever half as full as mine, not even that creepy place by the park district, with those hooded blokes in it. Hell maybe it's _because_ we're the closest pub outside the city, I know the guards in that place don't take kindly to raised words – or blades, if it come to that – on their turf. Much as I'd like to say it's because we've got the best beer no, we all get our brew from Sally and the others down at the orchards.

No, I reckon it's because of the scenery, no better way I can put it. The capital's nice and all but there's something about Goldshire that just brings them all in. They come out of all that stonework and jumped-up heraldry out into the country and they just…look around, faces somewhere between heaven and the clouds. Then they come inside and order the booze of course. But I reckon it's the greenery that does it, the trees and the apples and the shrubs and how bloody lovely the whole place is. You can walk outside in spring or autumn and just look around and see how blessed normal Goldshire is. No voodoo-storms like down in the Vale, no bloody feral wolf-things like Darkshire, no dust and more dust like they have down in the Blasted Lands (although they brew some good stuff there I'll admit, probably so they don't have to think about all that dust). Yeah, it's the scenery. Last some of them will ever see, first some of them have seen in years. Seen in decades maybe, with those elves, especially after…well I'm getting ahead of myself.

Because you're looking around and wondering about them aren't you? Yeah, the one over there, and the other by the fire, they're legit. A lot of them are. I mean don't get me wrong we get our fair share of poseurs in here, strutting about acting like they're king of the shit, but most of them come down fast enough once a _real_ one comes through. You can always tell. Some of the young lads 'round here will come in, all kitted out and off to join the Stormwind Guard or one of the guilds that a rep for adventurin', showing off the new blade he's bought with his Coming of Age money and whatever boiled leather passes for armour these days. He'll buy a drink and start telling everyone what he's gonna do, where he's gonna go. Sure as hell, one of them will walk in, like on-bloody-cue, and gods if that won't shut the boy up when he sees what a _real_ adventurer looks like. It's written there, on their faces. What they do, what they've seen. What they've had done to them. Wearing armour that's half rotted but the skin underneath isn't even scratched they're that quick, or robes so thick with magic it practically rolls off 'em like smoke they're so full of the stuff, or steel plate that just looks so goddamn solid you can't imagine anything getting through and it'll _still_ have bloody great claw-marks in it, made by what I don't know. And the _things_ they've got slung on their backs. I've had the blacksmith over here for drinks when they come in and he's told me it's impossible for metal to bend like that, but there they are anyway and I can only imagine the damage those things can do in the hands of an artiste. I was cleaning up one night, drunks rolled out and doors locked shut, and a bloody sword-blade comes down through the ceiling, quiet as anything, just a five-foot length of steel swinging through the wood like a pendulum. One of them had went to bed, propped his sword on the floor hilt-down all haphazard-like, and it just rolled over in the night. Hilt didn't go through but the wood didn't even slow down whatever that sword was made of. Scared the shit out of me.

Do they talk? Well…some. I think that's a little more expensive than the drink you're trying very badly to make last. Yeah I see that look, you're fooling no-one. You're with one of the city-papers aren't you? What's your angle here miss? Oh, well, that's not so bad I guess. Why not.

Most of them don't really care to chat, just coming in on one last stop before heading out and all they want to do is drown their worries one last time, or coming in from _out there_, and all they want to do is drown their memories so they'll forget. But some talk. Some of them talk like they have something heavy in 'em they can't get out any other way. I don't think they'll mind if I tell you. It's been a rough year, I'm not going to turn down a coin. People deserve to know, and some of them can't tell anymore.

I guess I'll do it for 'em.

-xx-

Would have been twenty years ago I think. Seems like six or seven but you know how time is these days. He must have been one of the first, poor bastard. Didn't even know what he was getting into. He looked like one of those recruitment posters you still see around, all blonde hair and freckles, blue eyes and a chin you could cut stone with. He was getting some eyes from the ladies from the second he walked in but he didn't even turn and smile, just straight down to the bar and asked for a drink. Then another. They're both down in seconds and he's looking down into the glass like it just told him his father died. Maybe I should have kept my mouth shut but I was young(er) and stupid and thought it was my duty as a barman to entertain my patrons. Maybe if I'd taken a closer look at his armour, and what was left of his blade, I'd have seen this was a man who'd looked across a battlefield at more than just another Orc-horde.

"Coming home from the front?" I asked cheerfully. We knew that something was happening over in Kalimdor with the elves and some pissant forest nobody could name. Give the Orcs a kicking, show them just because we weren't on their side of the water didn't mean we weren't watching them, and come home again no harm no foul. Things were so much simpler back then.

He laughed at me when I said that. I'd get to know that laugh well and strangely enough it was always a comfort even though it sounded like a death-rattle. It was the ones who said nothing that you wondered how close to the edge they were, but if they laughed you knew they still had something driving them on. "Yeah, the front, no" he said, gulping down his third. Not that any of them seemed to have done anything. Boy was steady as a rock. "More like the bottom." Then that laugh again. That one made me step back and take a look at what he was wearing, and I managed a sniff as well. Ever smell a cooking fire on a hot day? That kid smelled like they'd just turned one on and left it to burn. He smelled like charcoal and ash.

You have to see back then, we didn't _know_, not really. We had the orcs and the bloody undead but all that was up north, and nobody down south gave a goddamn when we had a whole continent and a city-full of dwarves between them and us. We had an easy life. There'd been rumours, some of those bloody creepy Dark Iron buggers coming out sometimes out of Redridge but the Bronzebeards – bloody good neighbours if you ask me – took care of their own and we didn't look too closely at what was happening. More fool us.

They'd sent this kid and his unit down after Windsor, one of the old crew back when the marshals were still expected to swing a sword around and fight with their men instead of behind them. Got one of the guilds to send down a team into the mines underneath Blackrock to find the bugger and by God they came up with who they were looking for and more. This kid had been the one to see it, just a quick look down one of those corridors, lava all around him and he sees it.

"Biggest thing I ever saw," he said, with a look in his eyes like he's still seeing it. "A giant made of fire."

I said those beers had finally gotten to him and he ought to take a break, and I think that got his guff up because he kept talking then, maybe to convince me he wasn't lying or maybe because he had to tell _someone_. He started talking and I always remembered what he told me. Back then I was barely into my thirties and stuff like this just didn't happen. Back then it was…it made you shiver to think there was stuff like that out there. Not like today.

"Ezekiel died first, poor bastard. He'd fought in the Gorge before and maybe he thought this was just a bigger version of what the Dark Iron had been fielding there but this thing…it just reached out and his armour melted away before the fist even touched. I got a look, one look and I could see him screaming before he just dissolved into nothing. Gods."

"We couldn't back down then of course, and maybe we deserved it. We'd been on missions through the Plaguelands running food to the people left there, fought through Dire Maul although we never got through the whole way to the core of whatever that place is now. Me and Ilsa had taken down a cabal of rogue warlocks the year before out by Felwood, trying to bring that place back to something resembling a forest instead of a toxic marsh. We thought we could handle it. We were stupid, just stupid."

Four of them came out alive. The lad and his partner, some priest and an archer, and the only reason why they lived was because they were farther away than the others. There'd been two of them, these Molten Giants. They'd finished crushing their mates and turned around, and these three kids had seen burning eyes looking at them. They ran.

"They sent us back in, how could they not? The Dark Iron were up to something down there – Light it was so _hot_ – and they needed to know what. Hired a couple of guilds out of the city for a lord's pay and sent them in with us. Anna didn't go, said she just couldn't. Left the guard the next day. Ilsa went with me. Lionel came back with us too, wanted to take them down for Ezekiel. Kept an arrow and said he was going to put it right in one of the giant's eyes if it killed him."

I asked him how it went and there was a little bit of a smile on the kids face as he told the story. And that laugh. "Oh they weren't titans or anything, they could die. Took us an age and a bunch of corpses but they died. Lionel even got that eye he wanted, even though it bloody well killed him like he said it would."

And then, I'd asked. The entire place was deathly bloody quiet and that's not a small thing for this place on a night. _Everyone_ was listening to this kid. I swear there were people outside listening in at the windows. Like I said this was another time, not like now. This stuff just _did not happen._

"Then we went in deeper." The boy shook his head. "Gods I've never felt heat like that. And the things inside. There were more giants and other things too, I don't know how anything could live in that place, not unless they ate molten rock and drank lava. We went in as far as we could."

Huge two-headed dogs that towered over them, big enough to eat a man alive in one gulp. Fire that moved across the ground like a living thing, rocks that came out of nowhere and hit hard enough to crush skulls. "It was hell but we kept moving anyway, Light I don't know why. We lost a few to the dogs I know that. Some others just…stopped. Like they couldn't go on. I saw Jacob walking into the lava like he thought it was a lake of water, I tried to stop him god I tried, but he just dived in. And they talked to us."

I'd filled his drink and he'd emptied it every time. I wasn't even thinking about getting him to pay, I just wanted to hear more.

"They were like snakes, but they had bodies like people. All teeth and horns though." The kid was staring past his drink like it wasn't there. "Just hissing at each other and at us. One of them was stood there, between us and the inside of the next cave, just…standing there. Like it was daring us to try and get past him."

And did you?

"Aaron did. Bloody stupid fool challenged it like he was back in paladin training and it was just one more fellow cadet fighting by the rules. It didn't care. Just skewered him like a slice of meat and stood over him while those dogs tore him up." Another drink, another refill. It's water now and this seems to be helping better than the beer. Cheaper too. "That was enough, I reckon. It had so many teeth and it just smiled at us while those puppies tore him up. I swear it was laughing. All those teeth, and that bloody great spear. I could feel fire on my back like something was choking me, and the only mage we had left was practically crapping himself with something, muttering about a curse. We turned back and it didn't stop us. I could feel those eyes on me when we left it, left Aaron's body like a chew-toy for those goddamn dogs."

Walking out, all alone, no food, little water, and only fire around them. Miles out of that endless blaze, he said. Walls and floors so hot it hurt to walk on or touch even through the leather, the priest that had come with them didn't have any skin left on her soles when they finally found a way out. The soldiers had it worse, their steel heating up until they were in ovens. Miles through nothing but red rock and scorching heat and all the time the demons in that hole kept at them as they walked, fast as they dared, knowing if they stopped the heat would overcome them, if they ran the heat would overcome them. Symon tripped just a little too close to an edge and went down into a pool of lava crying out _CATCH ME_ as he fell. They didn't even see what happened to Ilsa. They just hadn't heard her voice for a while and when they turned around to look she was gone. When they finally reached the bridge they were there again, two more of those bloody giants. Maybe even the same ones. The eyes followed them as they left.

How many?

"Twenty went in. Five came out." The boy raised a hand and you could smell the embers coming off that armour. Like he'd walked from the mountain to Goldshire and hadn't washed off between. "I found this in there, took it off some skeleton. We weren't the first, we won't be the last." He banged on the chest-piece with his free hand and I swear on my mother's life I saw black sparks come from that dark iron. "This is good stuff, whatever they made it out of. Dolem said he could make more, if we could get the ore, and I know we can. I know we can if we have to take forty men into that hell just to bring it back. We'll forge enough to get us back in without dying of that damn heat and we'll murder them all."

You're going back?

He looked up at me from his drink and there was something in those eyes. I was just a young barkeep (comparatively, comparatively) and I didn't know what it was then, but I know it now even if it doesn't have a name. It's what keeps them going back, these lads and lasses, the thing that makes them go on even when their friends are dead or worse. He had it in his eyes and while it was pure courage there was madness there too. "Of course we're going back. I saw it, in there, even if the others didn't. Just a glance but I know it's worse than what we think."

What did you see? _What did you see?_

He stood up then and for a second I thought he wasn't going to tell us, but he picked up the sword – really, the lump of charred iron that might have been a sword once – and faced the bar when he told us.

"Just a big room, bigger than any cave I ever saw, and _high_, twice as high as the giants that got Ezekiel at the start of the whole mess_._ But it had scorch-marks on the ceiling anyway. Something comes up from down in that lava lake, something twice as big as anything else in there. Something _huge._ There were skeletons littering the room, but all sitting in a giant spiral leading to the centre pool. Like a cult had walked in and just sat down and waited to die, worshipping."

Worshipping what, I asked, but he ignored me, just talked on.

"The colonel's been talking to SI-7 and he thinks there's something up north in Azshara, across the waters, that might help us. If there are fire demons down there why can't there be ocean spirits up here? Maybe they'll help us? Maybe they're at war. We'll go back because that was an army we saw down there, and those snake-men were soldiers and all soldiers have commanders."

"That huge cavern with the skeletons looking toward the centre was a throne-room, and somewhere in that hell there's a king of fire."

He walked out then and he took the smell of ash and charcoal with him. He'd paid for his drinks as he left. I'd never seen the coin before, looked dwarfish and for a second I thought the bugger had had me. It was gold though, solid gold. That was the first one for my collection, and believe me I have a hell of a collection by now. I saw the kid again once when he was older, not a kid then but a full colonel in the Stormwind Guard. I don't know if he killed his king of fire, and he couldn't tell me the details at that point, due to half his face being burned up and all of his voice with it. I hope he did though. I hoped to Gods and the Light he did.

-xx-

So will that do little miss? Your drink's gone warm although I can see your notebook's full. Oh? Well, I suppose it is pretty dark. Can I interest you in a room? Never-mind then, safe journey to you. Inn's always open, and there's more where that came from. The kid came and left but he wasn't the last to sit down there on that seat you're sitting on now, and just talk.

Hope to see you again.


	2. A Room of Hate

You'd never catch them unless you were watching.

They looked like all the rest, pretty much and you had to look _hard_ to see it, but you could do it. Of course by then they were glaring right back at you and you'd be lucky to get away with all your teeth. It was different for me though, you don't punch the man serving the drinks. I know most of us just sit back and serve them like one of those creepy gnomish robots, or try and be some kind of kind dear old grandfather like that old fart over in Goldshire, but I was never afraid to look them in the eye. Not in a bad way though. Most of them went into the adventuring business – not much other kind they'd be good for really – and I know people like to talk crap about the Guilds but those guys pull their weight. Stormwind would've burned down half a dozen times if it wasn't for those nutters. But anyway.

It would be the little things that tripped them up. They'd sit a little too close to the fire and the flames would go over their hands but they wouldn't even flinch. Or they'd order something hot and drink it still boiling and not notice the looks they got. Those were the lucky ones, who could pass. Maybe some girl or boy would come in dressed a little thickly for the sun outside and wouldn't take her gloves off no matter how much she sweated. They'd come in talking with their guild-mates and twist their head or arm just so without realising and you could see it on the neck or the wrist where the glove or scarf didn't quite meet the jacket. Even then unless you knew what you were looking for you might think it was a scar or something, but I know. I lived down in Dustwallow before I made enough coin to open up in the city and I know scales when I see them. Or it would be the eyes, or something, because no matter how human they look there's always one little bit left. A memento of their parents. One of them anyway. Not like the fakes who'd find any reason to work it into a conversation, would bluff and hope nobody noticed, trying to pass themselves off as children of Aspects or dumb crap like that with a shiny pendant that was supposed to be forged from dragonsbreath as 'proof'. The real ones didn't advertise.

It's the arrogance of the things, that's what gets me. They think they're better than us and they don't even try to hide it. Some of them have been good enough in the past but I never liked dragons. To them we're just smart dogs they can watch and get some laughs out of us. When a bigger dog comes through sometimes they help drive it off and sometimes they watch and see how we'll do. But they don't think of us as people.

The black ones are the worst.

-xx-

They came through would be fifteen years or so back now but I remember the day because she was beautiful. Yeah I'll admit it. Red hair's always been a weakness of mine and she had it down to the waist. Even past the armour which was black and red, all twisted weird on the shoulder where it looked like something had grabbed on, and covered in Light-knows-what that stank of blood to high-heaven. Ignoring that she was lovely. Even more so because I was drunk out of my mind, everyone was. They'd strung up the head outside the gates and _everyone_ who walked in or out of the city saw it there hanging from those chains dripping everywhere. The entire day was a party, everyone was invited and if you were one of them that had gone in and taken that scaly bastard down you were a goddamn hero and you drank free for that week. Most of them went out to Goldshire or the inn by the square, mainly to ogle at Allison I reckon, poor girl gets more than her fair share of grief but she's a rich woman for all the coin she sees cross that bar. Anyway.

I reckon she came because it was quieter in Old Town, and because _nobody_ liked dragons back then, not with what they pulled out of Nef…Nefarious? From the snake's lair when they were done with him. Hell, she'd probably been one of the ones that had done it and she just wanted to forget it. She wanted somewhere to drink in peace and that's what I provide. She walked in and was straight over to me. Didn't waste any time either.

"Hottest and strongest you've got." She looked me in the eye and I had to look away first. I pretended it was just to grab the bottle but I saw those red eyes and I couldn't look into them for more than a second. Like rubies.

She slid that gold piece over and either she didn't care or was too tired to care because I saw it on her hands too when she dropped it. Just a little strip of skin where suddenly normal pink flesh turned a little harder and greyer and made a diamond pattern before it turned back farther up her arm. I almost turned her out right there but I recognised the armour from the parade the other day and here its wearer was walking in with money. So I just poured and said the first was on the house.

She didn't miss a beat. "Then another after this one."

You did a damn good job out there, I told her, just for something to say. Then she laughed and it was in her voice was well, just a little hoarse and…different. Like the words had to kind of bend sideways in the throat to come out normally. I think one of the old hands in the back of the bar flinched a little, maybe he'd heard a similar voice out there in the forests when he'd been young and it had cost him that arm he was missing. But we were proud of the kids that day and I let her know it, just so everyone knew not to cause any trouble.

She laughed at that. "Proud. I suppose we should be." I wasn't sure what she was laughing at though, I poured her another and that vanished about as fast. It was around this time Jase came in, and he always was a little…clueless? He fancied himself a hero even if he never went farther from the city than Duskwood and now here was the real deal walking into his regular drinking hole, and a girl at that. Maybe he thought he had a chance. So up he comes and tries to start his routine. Little idiot, asking how easy it had been and what loot she'd gotten from the place, as if they'd gone into that mountain looking for _loot_. If he'd been sober I don't think he'd have noticed the scorn in those fiery eyes, it wasn't like he was looking at her face much. Like I said, beautiful, and rogues armour is a little more…shall we say form-fitting…than plate or robes are.

"So what'd you get out?" he asked, trying to shuffle a little closer. When she didn't move away he probably thought she was falling for his tricks, even if a five year-old could have seen she just didn't give a shit about him.

"What we got out?" she replied, and you could hear it in her voice; _who are you, little man?_ The voice was all smoke.

"Gold? Weapons? I've seen some of the-"

"People." That shut him up, and me too. She turned away from the bar and taught the brat a lesson. "You want to know what we got out of there? We got out everything that Nefarion had put in, and everyone." Another drink down, and she didn't even stutter. "What do you know about black dragons, kid?"

Normally he'd have baulked at being called 'kid' but I think it was those eyes that did it. They were dragon eyes and I'll swear until I die she was dragonkin. All that fire and scorn and all of it focussed on poor Jase. "Just what-"

"Just what you get told as a kid. But I _know_." I wonder what stories she got brought up on. One parent having to explain away why she didn't have a daddy or a mommy, and awkward questions. "Dragons don't give a shit about gold or gems or weapons you see." She drew out her dagger from the armour and it gleamed. It looked rare, unnatural. I know a guild sent down teams into Blackrock's depths to the Core and this must have come from one of those trips because it even _looked_ hot. "This? Nothing. Gold? They could have millions and not even realise it. What black dragons want is something different."

They hadn't expected it. Even after the mess with the Prestors, and the old broodmother down in the swamps they didn't know what that 'family' was like. She'd been picked to go on the final assault on the Lair because nobody was quicker against the scalies than her. There'd been forty of them, half seasoned old vets coming out of places like Stratholme, a couple lucky enough to have been into the Core and lived. The rest were meat, shields for the pros although Light knows the pros weren't going to tell them that.

"What black dragons want is _power._"

They had an old red down there and they were sucking him dry, using him as food or breeding stock or something even worse for the new batch. _New batch?_ Jase asked and I knew he didn't get it.

They want power and they'll do anything to get more of it. But even dragons can't be in two places at once (although some of the Blue buggers make an effort to fix _that)_. So they make armies, and either someone had an idea or Nefarion woke up _nasty_ one morning because he had a hell of an idea for one. Like a rainbow except instead of all pretty light and a pot of gold at the end this one would have teeth and claws and spit fire from _both_ ends. She talked on and I don't think she was even speaking to him. Maybe she thought if she told the whole thing that missing parent would hear her somehow.

"They were taking them apart, anything they could get their hands on. Red, blue, green, bronze, anything with a beating heart and they were sewing them back together and giving the bodies new brains, all working for him."

He grew them fast. They lost a good third to the first clutch of eggs when they walked through the hatcheries. She'd been there, this dragonkin whose name I never got, tiptoeing through the room when suddenly pillars had come out of the ground and started spewing poison.

"Adan got it first, he was right next to one when it came out. Just looked around and got a face-full of this crap and suddenly he's flapping around making a dumb noise like he's got his shirt stuck over his head. He spins around and there's nothing on his face but blank skin and he's choking and dying because he doesn't have a mouth or a nose or eyes anymore. Then the eggs hatched."

Thirty made it out, fighting their way through a mist that fused flesh together like it was putty, slowed them down as the babies came out around them and started feeding. They got through those rooms somehow, killed the drake at the end and they didn't know how, with swords they could barely swing and the mages half asleep from fumes, and if anyone fell down you didn't stop to pick them up or you'd fall next to them.

"We closed the door behind us, and Ceala was just a little too slow." The girl rubbed her shoulder like it was sore, and I could see the discolouration there wasn't a weird spot of metal but a burned-in imprint of a hand. "The portcullis came down with her still on the wrong side, and she reached out and grabbed on and screamed to open it, open it for god's sake open it. Eventually I managed to pull away and her arm came with it, the dragons had got to the rest."

I don't think Jase was really ever adventurer material; he never grew out of the swords-and-damsels phase most kids go through. He thought that adventuring was all castles filled with nameless mooks to 'slay' and a girl in a cage at the top to rescue.

"The rest was labs, goblins working on…on whatever the master had ordered them to." The eyes were on fire now and I could have drowned in them if she'd looked at me. "We killed them all and split up for the ones that ran, a few stayed behind to make sure none of them got past us and out. There was no mercy at that point. I can't go to Ironforge anymore, it smells too much like those labs." She looked over at Jase. "We weren't the first, those liars."

She'd walked back, blood all over her knives and dead goblins behind her, and one door too many away from the others, into the depths. Maybe she had been lucky and that other parent had stayed around for a little while to help bring her up because she could read the writing on those doors well enough.

_Rendering._

_Tanning._

_Reconstruction._

_Infusion._

Curiosity might be a human thing but I reckon dragons must have it too, and she went through one door too many, just curious. Because when Nefarion had his grand idea he didn't just stop at dragons.

"They were patchwork people. Some in the vats, some hung up like a rug you're still halfway through stitching together, and some chained to the walls. Those were the worst. You could look in their eyes and see them moving around, trying to figure out what they were."

Maybe she'd backed away and came too close to one or maybe one had been strong enough to get lose, because she felt a hand on her shoulder and for a second she thought maybe poor little Caela was still hanging onto it, begging to open the door, but when she turned wasn't her dead friend. It had been dead, once, but wasn't any more.

"It was half-finished, I could see that much." Jase wasn't talking much now. "All the little holes in the…fabric…where the stitching hadn't quite worked and you could see the muscles sliding around underneath. The eyes didn't match and the nose was a bad hackjob and whoever had worked on the mouth hadn't bothered to make sure the teeth aligned. It was trying to ask for help, I think. It had an eye I recognised though, from some old guild meeting. Just some poor sap went on the wrong job."

She ran. Oh she killed it first, as much as she could. When she turned and ran the parts were still kind of shuffling around behind her – Nefarion made his servants tough – and she didn't look too closely at the thing, or anything much, which was probably why she went through the wrong door.

"They were screaming, all of them. Like a butcher shop with meat hanging up and all of the meat is alive and it's looking back at you and it knows. It knows where they are and what's happened to them, and it's surrounded by _things _that look like it, and they know they can never get out. Stormwind must have sent in a raiding party ahead of us to gauge the land and the black fucker must have thought it a good chance to test his chromatic theory on non-dragons because there were thirty or forty of them and their pieces were all mixed up together. Just hanging there."

She killed them all?

"I killed them all. When I got back they must have been looking for me for about an hour. Sweet people, the best friends I'll ever know, because they stopped and came back for me. I led them to that room, it wasn't hard. I was covered in…in stuff and it had dripped everywhere as I ran. So we walked back like dogs following a trail of sausages and I showed them the bodies."

Then they went and killed the rest. There were others, normal dragons between them and the top and they didn't even slow them down. They lost another four of five, good people, good people who knew that there was no way they could turn back now. And she would have walked in alone if she had to, because she'd always feel that hand on her shoulder and the eyes on her back.

"We knew we'd done the right thing, because it was massive. I'm shocked we ever killed it. Just a giant thing with two heads, like down in the Core, but a dragon too somehow. It breathed fire and ice and it felt like fighting against time itself just trying to get past him but they did it, somehow. Pelinor lost to one head, just devoured wholesale while he stood there, unable to move or do anything but watch that endless maw descend on him. Velia put out of her misery as her skin sloughed away in huge sheets like paper after being just a little too slow against that corrosive breath.

"He laughed at us, at the end," she said. Not drinking anymore now, the bottle was empty and the rest was too cold. Some types of dragon can't abide cold and I thought I knew what kind she was then but I kept my mouth shut. "Even when we had him on all four of his knees. He knew, I think, just looking at us. Black dragons want power and even then he knew he had power over us. Knew that even if we chained his head to the entrance of the city for all time we'd still be afraid of him. Well I helped saw that fucker off and hang it there." She fingered the pendant around her neck, a gift from the Regent himself I knew, they had all got one. "We hung him from the gates and still I can't sleep. That hand. I'll always feel it." She stopped and stated across at Jase. He didn't really want to be there anymore I could see it, but I don't think he could leave either. "I almost didn't do it. I looked into his eyes and almost didn't do it."

"I have to go."

-xx-

She left then just as quickly as she'd come in and I never saw her again. Not in any of the guilds that came through here on the nights when the place was empty. Jase hung up his sword, found a steady life on the farm and he's happier now than he would have been out there I think. They kept the head up by the gates for about a week. They said they took it down because it had started to smell and the stench was driving out merchants, but I think they took it down because the eyes never decayed like the rest. I went in and out of the city a dozen times and every time I walked past the thing I'd swear it was staring at me, all of those teeth laughing and those red eyes still burning in the dead skull. I hated those eyes.

Because I think I know what she meant at the end there. You wonder why _all_ of the black dragons are just so goddamn evil. They're living thinking creatures just like us, not storybook monsters, so sometimes you just wonder why they all seem to act like it. Well I asked the last scholar to come through here when he was just drunk enough to talk about what he shouldn't and he said it's because of the blood. The blood of the brood-master calls out to the children and smaller drakes and dragonkin and whelps and it's the strongest orders they've ever felt and they're glad to do it, like brainwashing or mind-control. Maybe she had just enough of it in her to hear him talk but not enough to really listen. Even if she was human from the top of her head to the soles of her feet those eyes were a dragon's, and I think that those eyes heard the order and wanted to obey. Maybe they already are, because a rogue isn't a path you fall into because you wanted to protect others or heal the wounded or pull back the curtain of mystery. They don't have any job but killing. Maybe she fell into the family business, even if she didn't realise it.

The sign outside? Yeah, it's a little strange but it's right; I don't close anymore and there's a reason. You don't want to walk Old Town at night, I stay open so there's always some place to come to if you're so pissed-up you can't find your way home, or you don't have a home to go to. The Guard doesn't give so much of a shit about us out here, we get more bodies on the streets than the rest of the city combined and that isn't just due to the gangs. They come in sometimes, normal people _and_ the rough crowd, just looking for some place that's lit up, and they won't leave until morning. They feel breath on their backs and a hand brush their neck and they run here as fast as they can. Sometimes they look over their shoulder as they come in and they see eyes in the night, eyes that stare at them like they're just slabs of meat that barely got away. Eyes that that'll wait all night if they have to, and be waiting for them when they come out again.

Red eyes.

* * *

><p>-x-<p>

Hi and welcome (and hello again if you're here from the FFVIII section). This is going to be a series of short stories based around World of Wacraft, as told/narrated/written by the heroes to anyone that will listen, mainly about the 'big' events from the game but really any ideas I can get that I can turn into a tale. All feeback and critisim is welcome. I try as hard as I can but I can't proofread for crap so if anyone wants to volunteer I'd appreciate it, all I can promise is getting to see the chapters first (and you can start by helping me think up a better title than this one).

Hope you enjoy!

~Cobray


	3. A Feast of Dust

Well it was sandy I guess, if that was what you were asking. No, of course you weren't. How old are you anyway? Really? You wouldn't have been out of school when it happened then but I guess you must remember some of it Of course we heard about it in the background, but for us at the tip of the spear it was just…there for us and hell if we were going to ask where all that shit came from.

Don't get me wrong we were grateful for the help but back then we'd just have soon went in alone when the damn thing first popped up and screw the 'efforts' the civs back home went to. We sat around doing a whole lot of jack shit for months while we could have been out there earning. It's not like the guard, in a guild you worked for your food and if you didn't bring in your contribution you didn't get anything out of the stores. Kids ended up quitting after they got their trial and realised that on the lower end of the totem pole you were basically a gofer while the old hands got the big jobs and made the money. Sorry, sorry, this isn't what you wanted to know, but I'm trying to make you see how we all were back then. All young – or at least younger, in the case of the elves in the guild – and wanting our own crack at the starting line, especially after the blackflight got taken down. Light, we wished it had been us in there. Never mind half of the Blackwing team didn't come back and the other half ended up mad or bad in the end, we wanted to be heroes and we knew we were good enough. We just needed that one chance to shine and the desert gave it to us, at least that's what we thought at the time.

There's nothing else down there but sand, a lot of bugs and a lot of old ruined shit, and the wall of course. We'd travel through occasionally if we had duties in the crater but apart from that it was a lot of old buildings and ghosts that nobody gave a damn about. The elves had an outpost there and that's where it all started, just one guy travelling the right place at the right time, and he sees something goddamn huge and black wandering out of the desert, towards the crater. It dies, eventually, and this one outpost finds out there's something out there in the desert that's far more than just some bugs. The end of the world is lurking out there and it's finally waking up. That's when Baristolth walked out of the desert and everything went to hell. Until then everyone had thought they were just bugs, bugs and a few weird things we didn't really give a damn about explaining. That changed fast.

Your parents might remember it. _Everything_ was levied and taxed, right down to the shoes you wore, shipped out to the desert just waiting for the army to use it. I was young back but a sergeant already and they took me along when they went to meet the giant yellow bastard, out by those caves. He shifted in and out like he unstuck in time, but he showed us what we needed and told us what we didn't know. I'd never met a dragon before and I've heard stories about what they could do, but I'd have sworn we were sent right back there, not just watching it on the sand in front of us. I met Staghelm later and knowing what I do about him now I can't hate him, not with a kid of my own now. Maybe I'd have turned out like him if I had hundreds of years to think about something like that.

Then the day came.

What did we feel? We were _ecstatic._ This wasn't Blackwing or the Core, not just random fights against Orc patrols, this was a _civilisation_ we were going to take on, and it was _us_ this time. I don't know how many deals we made but the guild was a hell of a lot poorer at the end of that year than the beginning, this I know. We didn't get to bang the gong but by the Light it was our footsteps across the wall first and we were eager for it. Of course it didn't turn out that way.

They were bugs, you see? They're not like dragons or men or orcs. They had entire caves down there for breeding, and the warriors had fighting built into their bones. The door came down and we were in front, and we would have died right there if the dragon hadn't stepped in and filled that hole with fire. Thousands of the things just poured out, all arms and knives and claws, and before we'd even had a chance to think we were pushed back out, and then everything went to hell.

We won, pushed them back in eventually, but god you've never seen so much blood and corpses. You couldn't take a step without tripping over somebody, the sand kept sliding around your feet because it was soaked in blood. Eventually we just started using the bodies like stepping-stones because there was more flesh than sand to stand on. That's how I got my limp, just a little slow. I'm grateful though, I know others weren't so lucky. Saw my captain go down under something that could have been a dancing girl if it didn't have so many arms and blades, saw one poor bastard just get swallowed up when something big and black and mean came out of the sand.

It was twelve hours of hell. I looked out across that desert and there just wasn't anything left except corpses and blood, glassy sand where the mages had done their best, not that it helped them in the end. I know we managed to take down a couple of the big ones – think I might have even done for one myself – but I couldn't remember how, and there was that hole in the Wall still there. A lot less of us were left to look at it. They got every guild together into Silithus and maybe none of them went bust because of that half-day, all of them lost a lot of dues-paying members. I go down there once a year and leave something for the fallen, and sometimes you can see a hand or sword or something poking out where the wind shifted the sand away. They didn't even bury them; just let the desert swallow those people up. Hundreds, maybe thousands of them, and most of them were still there, preserved under the sand where the flies and disease can't get to them. If the undead ever made it that far south that'd have a party.

We needed to go in of course, after what came _out_ there just wasn't any way we could leave him. The big one, Rajaxx, had been screaming from the pedestal for the entire day and it was like nails down a chalkboard, or biting into ice. He was shouting about old gods and new truths and I knew he wasn't lying, whatever he was. When Staghelm asked I volunteered, like a bloody fool, and most of our guild with me. We had spent all that money and called in all the favours we had and in the end we went in first because we had the most people who could stand up and hold a sword.

They called it a city and that's we all expected. Thinking back it was that that got us. We'd all fought worse-looking things, dragons and demons and some of the truly strange things that magicians had thought up and we'd had no trouble. These were just bugs. 'Just' bugs, hah. They had their own version of siege engines, those giant black dog-faced bastards that could step on you faster than you could raise a shield. We started off well enough all right, taking down the prophet. That's when a few of us started to realise this wasn't what we were expecting. It was strong, stronger than anything I'd ever fought. Just when we thought we had him he'd suddenly be somewhere else and the thing your sword had cut was just mist. We lost more like that too. Someone would slice straight down the middle of the bastard and then turn away when he realised it wasn't real, and the damn shadow would skewer him. Even if it wasn't real it could kill. Eventually we just ran at him and chopped and cast and sliced as fast as we could as hard as we could. I don't think it expected that, maybe that's why we won.

It was all underground of course. Silithus had bug warrens but nothing like this. We didn't have any _really_ old elves with us either, they'd kept well clear of the place for centuries so we had no idea what to expect. Poor Erik jumped down a tunnel to go and see what was down there, just thought it was another tunnel, and it just…vanished after him. The sand collapsed and I don't think he even realised there was no way out. I saw him later I think, but…anyway.

I think we spent three days down there. No way of keeping track of time, no way of telling if it was day or night. The walls just glowed like the sand around us was made of lights, and always you'd hear bugs inside the walls, the ceilings, all around us. We'd double-back down a tunnel to dodge around s group of feeders and they'd come up from behind us like they'd had an ambush laid down there for years, just one more patch of sand that looked identical. We'd wander to and fro and sometimes get lucky, get somewhere they hadn't been able to block off in time and there would be…it was always different. A pile of goop that came alive and ate you up, and the rest of us would sit there hammering on it while we could see you inside being digested alive, skin and bones. In the end the mages we had left did for that one, just froze and shattered it, not that it did Faela much good. We found a family once, I'd swear it was a family. There were maybe forty of us left, strewn around inside that city keeping in touch by the mages we had.

I'm not proud of the things we did down there to stay alive. There was just no other food. By the fourth day or so we might have been miles underground and we knew we'd never make it out without some kind of help. They were leaving us alone at that point. We'd see them in the darkness ahead or behind us before they scuttled off, but they never attacked. Maybe they just didn't want to waste the manpower, or the flesh. We'd been eating them just to stay alive, and when they went away…You can figure out the rest. I'd finish my watch and go to sleep, and when I woke up some of them would be staring at me, hoping I'd have died in my sleep, because they knew the first one to go would provide for the rest.

Eventually we just…slid down, to the bottom. We were superb soldiers, even like we were, and the ones left swore if we were going to die down there we'd damn well take as much of their civilisation with us as we could. Bugs are all the same, there had to be a queen down there somewhere, and we'd find her and gut her and laugh while the rest butchered us. Well we were close enough, they certainly had royalty. Slaves must have built the place down there, because eventually we started coming up on them. Just a few little hints, some smooth rocks or chips of stone on the sand. Then we found pillars and walls and carvings and we knew this was something big. Like up above, they'd built a temple and sunk it _under the earth itself._

They were huge. I don't remember what they looked like. All I can remember is dozens of eyes staring down at us from the darkness and feeling nothing, nothing at all. I've been in battle-trances before and this wasn't that. More like our brains looked up and saw those two…_things _and knew it'd have to shove out those dumb slow minds so they could fight. God, I wish someone had been there to see us, because then maybe I'd remember what happened. They'd shift mid-swing and suddenly the shield you were holding up to block that giant sword was no good because it was fire raining down on you, and all around us more of the bugs trying to chew at whatever flesh they could reach. God knows how many of us got out of that room. I remember Elizabet losing her sword sometime and just dragging around a chunk of the giant one's blade, no handle or anything, just held onto it and let it slice through her hand whenever she swung it. I heard later when we were back up and in the hospital she cut it off at the wrist one day, said it was unclean.

How we got out? You know in the end I don't remember. We were deep down, so deep it felt like the world above us was on our backs, like a weight on top of our armour we couldn't take off. I know it got too much for some of us, Dane's probably still wandering in that sand-maze, trying to find his way through. Just took one wrong turn and suddenly there's a wall behind him where there wasn't one before and he's got nowhere to go but on. The rest of us just walked, killing as best we could. We were dog-tired but we never sat down. I think I remember…

No, that can't be right.

There were walls, some kind of temple.

_A TOMB_

I'm sorry, it's just a little hard to think in here. It's dark, hard to think.

I can remember someone looking at me but I can't remember who it was. Erik, I think? There were ropes holding him down, or something. He didn't look happy to see me but…I think he was trying to speak to me, or something inside him or behind him or through him was trying to speak. You could see they'd been dragged here, everyone we'd lost or who'd fallen on the way. The damn bugs had dragged them through the dirt and stripped the steel and armour off and just laid them there in front of the

in front of the…

I don't

some kind of

and then I had

_A GIANT EYE! A GIANT EYE AND IT WAS EATING THEM ALIVE! GOD, WHY CAN'T I THINK, WHAT WHEN WHERE DID WE GO! THERE'S NOTHING DOWN HERE NO PLACE LEFT! WE'Ll NEVER GET OUT WE'LL NEVER GET OUT  
><em>

to finish him off. Just a boy and he ended up down there. I don't remember much, I'm sorry. What's wrong, you look pale?

We got out in the end, somehow. There were some dragons down there, old as the goddamn alliance itself. They were grateful for…something?

Something we did down there?

They took us out I guess and oh Light the sun, it was like we'd never seen it before. I took off my armour and just rolled around in the rays and I could see my skin was pale, for some reason. They came and found us and we got what we wanted in the end. Maybe five of us, out of forty from the guild, out of maybe a hundred of two hundred that fought their way into the city. I heard there was a smaller group that infiltrated the ruins, I think some of them were among the people I saw being eaten in-

Wait, eaten?

By what?

I don't…

We came home and they gave us what they could. Some weird things they couldn't explain. Dogron lost an eye because it wouldn't look where he wanted it to and always itched. Elizabet's hand, she swore it tried to choke her in the night. I got away lightly, I think. Just a few scars. Some bad dreams. The guild had to disband afterwards, there was just nobody left, and nobody who'd been in the War wanted to sit around and break in new blood. We took the money and quit. I met Bette here and had the little one, and I just hung up my mace. Some of the old hand some by sometimes just to talk, Faela and Erik and the

others

wait

I…

Regret it? Sometimes, I suppose, when I think about everyone who didn't make it, who

i see them in my sleep

not gone

still there eating the dust and sand

a giant eye

aren't here to celebrate with me. We did what we had to do through. Write that in your little paper, if you like, it's pretty much what every single one of us will tell you. We took the gold, don't doubt it, but in the end we went down there to make things safer for the ones up here, the ones who couldn't fight. We did our duty.

I just wish I remember what that duty was.


	4. A House of Skulls

Do you really need to do this? It's been how many years now, why can't you people just let it go. No need to go digging up old bodies. From what I'm told whenever one of you bothers to pass by you've got some bodies out there in the north that don't _need_ any help to dig themselves up. Go deal with those instead of bothering us here.

_Bodies? But you told the last-_

Shit, you read that report? Wait, what am I saying, of course you read it. Not like Sai-seven ever throws away anything is it? So what is this, checking up on us all again? Have a list of the old guild and making sure we all still tell the same tale?

_Just a routine follow-up. To see how you're doing._

That's crap and you know it. Let me guess; there's a new sub-head or division leader and he got his hands on one of the old reports you made us do when we came out, and he didn't believe it. Worse, he thinks we were kidding when we told all that. Even with all of the stories matching up he thinks we're fucking with his head, for whatever reason. Being an intelligence creep he can't stand thinking that someone's gotten one over on him. So he sends out an order and that gets passed down and down again and finally here you are; the small end of the law, sent out here to pick my brain. Am I right?

_..._

Hah, thought so. Well I can't exactly complain. The city gave us some money and you hire us when they need the cadre for the new blood. We're doing fine, all of us. There, there's your follow-up. Now what do you really have to ask? Just get it over with. Gods, I came out to the boonies to get away from shit like this.

…_I have a list of questions, it may take a while._

Story of my life.

-xx-

I was born in Stratholme, you know. How's that for motivation? I was just a kid when the plague hit, all I have are memories of some bumpy cart-rides and my father looking down at me and saying 'Anne, we can't go home tonight'. I didn't get it really, and neither did he I think. Mum knew different, but she didn't say anything. We were put up in Brill, our family always knew how to work hard and there was a new home eventually, not much different from the old one but we shared it with a couple of other families, just until the Guard could take back Strat from the 'invader' and we could move home. They didn't even tell us what had really happened you see, we just thought it was orcs or something, no way to find out either. Now they can send a message across the world in days, not weeks. Less, if you know a mage willing to take a bag with him. But anyway. Nobody knew how bad it was going to get back then, the prince had been missing for months and we'd heard nothing from the north. No way to know he was back, and…different.

It was quiet, but that lasted for maybe a month. My mother was militia, she'd come home from patrol talking about the gnolls she'd had to drive from the farms, or the giant animals that came crawling out of Silverpine up to Brill. Then she came home telling us about the people coming from the east, out of our old home, saying they were different too. Then she came home from a wide-range patrol and told us what was happening to the land out there, and she always washed her armour off before she even touched us. One day she didn't even need to go out, the entire militia was posted around the town and all children were locked in the houses, and all night long we heard…something…coming from out there. We didn't hear anything from inside but a whole bunch of people moved south after that night. We didn't though, we still believed we'd go home just as soon as the Guard managed to drive off whatever was living up in Stratholme now. Then one day my mother didn't come home at all.

_What did she-_

No. Just no. Next question.

…_How did you join up with the guild?_ _I've got your enrolment form and it says fifteen. Did-_

Fifteen? Hah, that's what Peracle told you? That short asshole, he's a drunken liar. I trusted him with my life but not my beer, or money. I joined at seventeen like everyone else. I wanted to go back, you see. Stratholme was my home, my old life was still back there.

Father took it badly after mother…after she died. We came down south to Stormwind with the money we'd saved, crossed the Arathi bridge and into Wetlands. The dwarves were helping get people through the passage and moving them south as fast as they could. That's one of the reasons they built Deeprun, light bless 'em. I met Peracle there, in that mountain they dug out.

We got jobs, like I said we worked hard. My father worked on the walls as a mason, didn't need to have a brain, all he had to do was move stone around. He liked it I think, it took his mind away from his mind while he got over it. I managed to beg a job with one of the fisheries on the docks, delivering to the inns. That's where it started really. I was in one of them dropping off the haul and turned around to leave and there they were.

_They?_

One of them was a wall. I mean a _wall_. Looked like cannonballs would have bounced off him and he could have skinned a tiger alive with those blades on his helmet. The woman was something else as well. Like she was barely there, something in the leather that seemed to drink the light up. Of course later I found out what magic did that but at the time I was seventeen and they were amazing. I remember the man looked a little bit like someone I had known, and the woman had amazing red eyes. This was after the Lair was destroyed and everyone knew the stories. I never thought I'd meet one and god damn here they were, right in front of me.

_Red eyes?_

Yes. But it was the man that got me, because I recognised who he was by then. He'd been a soldier back in Stratholme, back in the guard. He knew _me_ too, god I'll always remember it. I was standing there smelling like I'd been rolling around in fishguts – which I had been – and he was smiling down at me and asking how my father was doing. That did it. He reminded me of my father.

_You joined the guild?_

Bet your ass. They didn't take everyone back then, not in the big leagues. You needed something, and I had it. I didn't have magic or speed or wits like some of them did, but you work on a fishing trawler for years and you get _power._ I was strong, and I had faith. Anyone coming out of the north had faith back then. They spotted it and took me on, and I'll always be grateful.

_Can we skip ahead to the citadel._

Sure, why not. There was nothing for a few years, just training, training, more training, and bloody missions in between. Driving orcs out of the forests for the elves, running errands for those crazy assholes in Arathi. Peracle joined up a couple of years after I did and we were assigned together, between my mace and his rifle we rolled over everything they sent us at. We were something special and they knew it, and that's why we were picked. We'd paid our dues and this was _it_. We still remembered the Lair, and the Bug War-

_The War of the Shifting Sands._

Nobody except historians called it that. When the invasion came we were ready and we wanted to go. He wanted the gold and glory but I wanted my home back.

_The citadel…?_

It started slow. Just a few more zombies wandering around, a few more wights drifting out of the north. A village here and there disappeared and we'd go in and find them all turned and we'd have to kill them again, poor bastards. Then _it_ appeared, we never figured out how. I asked one of the men on the towers and he said it just arrived. It was special though and we knew it. A giant pyramid floating in the air? We knew, and I was furious. Above my _home._

_You were sent in with the guild raiding parties, and the others._

Yeah we went in, along with the Blackwing veterans, and whoever survived the Bug War. Maybe twenty of them, and you could see they were different from us. I met him again there, the old man who'd been from my home. He was still smiling, told me he was looking forward to working with us. I was blushing like a goddamn kid.

_What happened inside?_

They lost it. We…

…_Are you okay?_

Bad memories. Just bad memories. Hard to think sometimes.

_We can take a break if you want._

No, let's just get this over with. Where was I?

_You said you lost-_

Yeah, we lost it. I'm not proud of it. It wasn't obvious but the cracks were there, and it started right after we got up. Because there was no way back out, once we were in. We didn't even think, and the bastards down on the ground didn't bother to tell us. There was _no way out_.

_What was it like?_

What, you don't have the _reports_? They made everyone who got out do one. So don't you know?

_I'm just asking-_

It was made out of the dead. That's what a necropolis is, right? It was like they were expecting us, we just turned up inside a huge goddamn entry hall, four ways of leaving but none of them leading back down, and…noises…coming out of every room. And the walls watching us, all the skulls just staring down from where they'd been just…glued on, like they'd needed to build more but ran out of stone and all they had left was bones. Some of them were new too, gods…

_You said this in the last report too. What did-_

Of course I did! Did you think we were making this shit up! Adams lost it, right there. He recognised someone he knew, someone not…dead for a long time. Glued onto the walls like so many stones and bricks. He was crying, no use. The rest of us just watched while the vets talked amongst themselves. Eventually they came back to us and told us what we were going to do.

_How many of you moved in?_

Including the vets? Maybe forty altogether, and we were sent out in scouting parties. This place was _huge_, I'm telling you, bigger on the inside than the outside maybe, and _old._ Someone fell through loose masonry and we could see Stratholme underneath, and there was _no way_ we were that high up. So they told us what they were going to do and the newbies who were smart listened, and none of us were inclined to be stupid. We split up. God it sounds so dumb now but we did. We thought; there was no way ten people to a group could be taken down. Our group was lucky. Me, Peracle, the old man and a few others. Spiders and shit, we could handle that.

_What did the other groups do?_

They weren't so lucky. We met up a few times, the place was a giant labyrinth and the antechamber was the only thing you'd even call 'safe ground' and only then because the things inside Naxxramas had some kind of…conditioning? Training? They wouldn't go there though. They'd come to the archway in and just stand there staring, if they had eyes. Maybe the necromancer didn't want his pets mixing, because they never did while we were in there. We loved that room. We came back whenever we needed to. At least they did. I didn't like it so much. Sometimes I…no, it's nothing.

_It was an experimentation ground. The group under Relya Nightsong._

I never liked her, but she was good. Arrogant, thought we were just dead weight. A lot of the old guard were like that. Learned her lesson a little too late. She had some smarts though and she took us through what she saw. Yeah, he was building things in there. An entire group found a laboratory for flesh-working in there, most of them didn't make it past the guard-dog. She came back though, missing an arm and bleeding everywhere and she still managed to report what she learned even bleeding like a pig with a slit throat. Then she just…turned and walked back in. Didn't want to be a burden to the rest of us. Fucking bitch didn't even let me say 'I told you so'.

_We have reports from your relief that say you-_

The relief! Thank the gods. I loved those guys. You learned I guess, after the mess with those poor bastards down in Ahn'Qiraj. A mage came in after us and god knows what he cost because he could make a portal strong enough to punch through whatever the necromancer was using as shields. Took us down and everything we brought out, everything we'd got by killing whatever came at us out of the walls.

_Spymaster Worden says you weren't friendly when you reported in._

Well why would we be? You took all our shit! We prised that stuff off the walls with our goddamn hands and you took it away for your little projects, and you fucked it up.

_The third tier?_

Nobody called them that, and even if they weren't your idea how the hell could you all be so dumb? Did you see the daggers and swords we brought out and your little eyes lit up with…'possibilities'? Just totally forgot _where the stuff came from?_

_The armour wasn't meant to be-_

But it was and that's the bloody point. I was with the old man when they gave it to him. It was a goddamn work of art, even compared to the stuff the old hands brought out of the desert temples. All white and shining. I helped him test the thing, even. He put it on and said 'Anne, hit me'. I thought he was nuts but I did it. Gave it my biggest hit and the mace _bounced off_. Damn near shattered the head, even. He was ecstatic. Down there outside the citadel of course it seemed magical. It was only later when…Whatever. Whatever. Just ask.

_You went back in. What did you find?_

Nightmares. I still have them. We'd left dozens of corpses inside, poor bastards who'd fallen when we were scouting, and hey, none of the bodies are where we left them. We still heard them though. Either taunting us to come in farther or screaming for help, depending which wing they were coming out of. I met Relya again, sewed into some gigantic thing I don't even want to remember, spitting curses at us before we cut her down. The knights there, gods there were dozens. Everyone who'd died in the first wave, everyone who died at Brill, everyone who died at Stratholme. Still there, still training, but to kill us this time. My mother always told me…

_What did she tell you?_

Nothing. Nothing.

_What were the threes like?_

What were they _like?_ They were a goddamn miracle. We could just stand back and watched. The old man was just swinging away and the corpses almost fell apart. The priest girl was…she was something else. I saw a dog, one of the big ones, come up and she just waved a hand and it melted from the inside. I looked into her eyes and an angel smiled out, an angel that could look at a death knight and tear it apart from the inside with a whisper. The sight was…they were amazing. For a while at least.

_The corruption?_

Yes of course. Light he must have been laughing at that throne-room. You built the armour out of _his own house_ and you didn't think that might affect anything? The old man was first. I…I noticed but I didn't think what it was. He kept twitching, kept looking over his shoulder like someone was whispering to him. He'd get a little short with us which you know, understandable since we were fighting our way through a goddamn undead fortress in the sky. Then the soldier came.

_Gleny Robin_

Gleny, yes of course that was his name. He was one of the new batch with us. All he did was put a hand on his back, just to ask how the old man was feeling.

_He died. I-_

No, he _was killed_. Old man just spun around and took his head off in one swipe, and nobody knew what the fuck had just happened. Like one of those moments where you meet your true love and your eyes meet across a crowded room, and time stands still. Well time stood still and the rest of us looked into his eyes and they were dead and empty. It had got him. Whispering in his ears and a hand on his shoulder and it had got him.

_The others were the same._

How many? I never asked. Tell me that at least.

_All of them. Some took longer than others. The heavier armour first then the rest. Reivich first, wearing the Dreadnaught plate, then the others one by one. Alice last._

I remember Alive, she was the priest. I'm a man's woman but she was beautiful in that getup, anyone could see. I think I heard her laughing once, after the turn. What was funny about that place I don't know. Guess you had to be mad to laugh. Mad to get out.

_What did you do?_

We ran, any direction we could. Me and Peracle almost didn't I think but someone else got to the old man faster, tried to hold him back, but the geezer just smashed him down as fast. So we ran, the only way we knew. I can see your pen hovering over your little list, and I can read upside down good enough. You want to know.

_You were the first. We want to know._

The sword's lost, let it go.

_We want to know._

Dead men everywhere and the best of us went nuts from that armour you put on them. Mother always told me to be good or the ghosts would come and take me away.

_We want to know._

Fine, _fine!_ Gods and light damn you, but you answer me two questions after.

_Deal. Did you see the sword?_

All I got was a glimpse, wandering around in that giant tomb for hours. I went past the door, swimming through that goddamn slime to avoid the knights and I came up for air and there they were, just sat there like they were expecting someone to come by, and wanted to look their best. He was there as well, the legend in the flesh. Or lack of it. Yeah, I saw it. My mother told me stories when I was a girl and I'd recognise it anywhere. But it was dead, just as dead as the man who held it.

_It was-_

Corrupted. Wasn't any kind of holy blade in his hands, just a dead thing with a skull in it, staring out. Gods, so many bones in that place. Just piles everywhere, crunching under you when you walked. I saw his eyes, I don't know if he saw me looking in. The woman did though. Smiled at me and did that thing with the hand; _come here._ Part of me wanted to.

_Did you?_

I ran the fuck away, didn't give a shit what was chasing me. That's when I met the old man. God, it was a maze in there. He was just walking down the room, towards the four horsemen I'd ran from like a scared little girl. The armour was talking to him, I could see it moving. It was white and beautiful and I could see it moving over him and whispers coming from it, and he was listening. I think he was already gone, and all that was left was the armour talking to the shell he'd left behind.

_The priest, did you meet her again?_

I…what? No. I don't think so at least. She was another group, the only person I saw in there was the old man. I ran out and got to the antechamber and I sat there for half a day waiting for the relief, and I came down and told them everything and you _fuckers_ didn't believe me. Now you answer me a question.

_I really think I have to-_

We had a deal.

…_What?_

Did we win?

_I…what do you mean._

It went away, I was there for that. Sitting at the bottom in the hills trying to sleep with the others and suddenly thunder, and we wake up and it's gone. Did we _win?_

_Yes. The final teams managed to breach the sanctum and overpower the necromancer. We recovered the soldiers in time before the necropolis fell._

…You're lying about something. I can't tell what. Honestly I couldn't give a damn. Anyway, you have your answer, the one you really wanted. You can't get the Ashbringer back, it's beyond your power now. So you answer me my second question and then you get out of my house and let me grow old in piece. Those 'tier three' clanking bombs you're so proud of, did you get them all? Lot of people coming and going and some of that stuff was light enough to hide under a robe or a cloak. How many of your precious experimental armours are still out there?

_None. They died when the necropolis fell._

…Good. Poor bastards, I wouldn't wish that on my worst enemy. The things in that place, you could tell he enjoyed making them. Giant dogs and things made out of people and legions of knights. Thank gods we did it.

_Thank you for talking._

Just leave. Leave and let me be.

-xx-

_SI:7 – First Squad – Recorder Five_

_As you can see the information and leads gleaned from the deceased Sgt. Peracle has been incredibly useful. While disguised as a common dress the patterning and etheric scent around the body made it unmistakable as the 'Faith'-type raiment constructed by the late Archbishop. Even years after the disappearance of Naxxramas the armour remains both powerful and dangerously smart. Repeated references to this 'old man' figure are most likely the remnants of the original personality kept as a cover for the shell beneath and to a normal person would pass easily as real memories. It also appears to be quick to adapt, as my own prompting of random names of my own invention were quickly integrated into the memories of the host. Upon searching the township I found no living inhabitants but in the surrounding countryside I spotted several undead creatures, who all kept their distance even as fresh meat presented itself. I believe this to be no accident, as the township of Brill lies close to the west. I believe the Faith armour has been devouring the local undead population to maintain its power while awaiting orders from the departed lich.  
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_As for our next course of action: As proved in the Dreadnaught incident, when revealed and threatened the armours are still incredibly potent and lethal. With our causalities in the last operation I would advise a mage-cadre to simply annihilate the entire town, and pay off the locak Undercity guards as needed. While I understand the tier three armours to be of immeasurable value to the Alliance I believe that the scientific value of their study is far and away less than the risks of the necropolis re-emerging from the northern wastes and the armours becoming active and malevolent, especially as so many seem to have chosen to go dormant close to major population centres._

_Results would be devastating._

* * *

><p>X<p>

The new name of this fic comes from a change in how the rest of the stories will be presented. Originally all of the chapters were going to be from the POV of the various Azeroth bartenders as the local heroes told their tale. I left this format pretty quickly after the first two chapters as I've realised it was pretty limiting when there are so many other ideas for vignettes like this (like the one above). Thus, a new name for the collection.

Thanks for reading. All feedback welcome.

~Cobray


	5. A Trick of Light

_Log 1_

I was lucky enough to overhear yesterday, don't think the others knew I was listening in. They're taking the readings from the ley-lines and the few sightings from the guilds we keep on retainer but I don't need that, I've been down there and you can see it if you have the training. The tower is becoming active again, it's occupied. I went down to the Pass and its just blasting mana out into the air like a fountain. It's incredible, there's nothing else it could be. If Medivh is really back this could be the start of a whole new thing. They'll to mount an expedition now, proscription be damned. They want what's inside, it'll be a race to see which discipline can recover the juiciest stuff fasted.

I don't have much time. A few hours to get the Archmage back from Theramore, a few more to confirm everything because they're old and slow and they won't believe it. Two or three days to get the guilds in and get the raiding party together. Because that's what it'll be, a raid. They'll storm in and tear the place apart trying to get what they want, and when they're done it'll be ruined forever.

If I pack today I can be gone and away before roll-call tomorrow. There's no ley-line into the valley, can't port directly there. A gryphon down to Duskwood, a few hours across the pass to the tower. By the time they can get an expedition together I'll have been in for days. More than enough time to introduce myself and get on an inside track, with the man himself or whatever's lighting up Karazhan like a wintersveil tree.

Doable.

-xx-

_Log 2: 1__st__ Day_

The seal's broken, anyone can just walk in now. I stepped over the doorframe and I swear I could feel the magic start flowing around me. The SMO hasn't even posted a guard at the entrance, just a single man with a sword, and some gold coin made sure he was looking the other way. It's amazing, I can feel the power practically oozing out of the walls, and I'm only past the front door! I'm stood in the stone entryway and I can see the shades walking around in the stables, looks like the old man used them instead of hired help, or the hired help stuck around after they passed away. It's funny watching them try to feed the horses at least, the hay just falls through. I'm going to keep my distance until I can find out what orders he left them with, they're ghosts but those pitchforks are solid enough.

I'm going to move further in, I can hear noises coming up the stairs but they're faint. Getting louder though, like the whole place is still waking up. I don't dare take my time down here, I only have a few more days until the Stormwind Mage's Organisation gets their act together and sends in a real team.

Wish me luck, diary.

-xx-

_Log 3: 1__st__ Day_

At least I won't starve! Looks like tower's been expecting us, already laying out a feast somewhere. Sorry for the scribbles, writing on the move. Walking through empty ballroom, smell coming from kitchen. Will check later, still empty, only ghosts behind me although man at the front now. Like tower is regenerating spirits one by one. Making map as I walk, can already see big job ahead of me. Tower is bigger on inside, by calculations I should be outside walls but am standing at the top of staircase, looking down onto ballroom now. Large room ahead, moving on.

_-_xx-

_Log 4: 1__st__ Day_

Thank the gods I didn't stop, thank the gods I kept walking to write the last entry. The tower's waking up and it's waking up from the bottom to the tip. I wasn't out of the ballroom before they appeared behind me. They looked like liches, or some kind of armoured bone construct. I didn't dare move until I realised they weren't turning around, they must only be designed to keep people out, not in. I can hear music from back in the ballroom as well, I think the party's starting without me. I have bread and some sustainables in my pack, that'll have to last me until I can find a back way into the kitchens. I tried to manifest some simple loaves but something in the air stopped me.

I can still glance around and see past the guards though, and I damn if I didn't go the wrong way. I can see women moving around in one of the doorways back in the ballroom. Looks like Medivh didn't even need to leave the tower if he wanted to…relax. All that's in front of me now is a giant stage, like an opera house. I wonder what kind of shows the old man likes.

-xx-

_Log 5: 3__rd__ Day [Postulated from our own recordings, this is the last entry in which he was in-sync with outside time. Obviously the young human tripped more defences than he realised. –Ryhanda]_

Gods and fuck that hurts. I've stopped in the boxes above the stage for now, I don't know if I can make it any further while the show's going on and it's been going on for what seems like hours. There wasn't any other way up so I was coming up from backstage when one of the actors appeared behind me. Big wolf. Biggest fucking wolf I ever saw half-built behind me and I swear it was already licking it's lips while the muscle was still appearing on it. I ran like hell but not fast enough, managed to get through the stage but not without claws across my back. Looks like it can't leave the stage either, because it didn't follow me even though it could have torn the door down no problem. Wish I'd taken some priest training now because these bandages I've made aren't doing much. Plus m robe is ruined now. I'll wait until it's dark or the show stops and then move on. The tower has its own light.

No wonder they talked about the old man like they did. The power it must have taken to set this thing up is beyond anything, even the Archmages. I can enchant something for a few hours if I try hard. Instructor Jennea has that stupid mana wyrm thing that follows her around but I know she has to re-cast it every day or it vanishes into nothing. Those creepy bastards in the Slaughtered Lamb have to pay in blood for their 'pets' but _this_ place just keeps on going. He's been gone for decades and it's still running like clockwork.

Can't stop here. I have to find out how. Imagine the look on their faces when they finally get in and find me sitting here.

-xx-

_Log 6: 5__rd__ Day _

_[Outside it was still the first day. Looks like the old man had a mean streak when it came to intruders. -Jeanna]_

Oh God I'm so tired. Almost too tired to pick up the damn quill. Looks like he was smart enough to see me coming, I only got through by running like hell and slowing what I could. Felt like my mind was being sucked out through my chest. Like Jennea's wyrm but so _many_ of them and so much stronger. And the ghosts. Looks like the tower caught up to me, it's making things faster than I can climb it. I think I dodged the worst of it though, makes sense he'd put the best defences on the lower floors, kept the rest relatively clear. It's like there's a path ahead of me that's being kept clear, probably the way the old man designed it so he could move through his own tower. Just have to make sure I keep to it and he'll never see me coming. I ran out of the stuff I brought in with me and I'm using whatever I can summon to eat, but I'm pretty sure there's a way down to the kitchens from this tower so that won't be a problem. There's a door I passed I'm almost certain leads outside, if only I can find the key, so I won't have to pass through the ballroom again at least, or that damn wolf. Between that and my skills I'm pretty sure I can make the top while the invaders are still working through the opera-area. My luck's holding.

Just need to rest first.

-xx-

_Log 7: 6__th __Day_

_[Wrong. It was at least his eighth day in Karazhan, from his point of reference. –Elsharin]_

_[He was probably a little delusional from lack of nutrients. He never was very good at basic materialisation. –J]_

I think it's slowing down, like when you wake up and turn over to go back to sleep. I passed through a hallway you could have put the entire Mage Tower in laid on its side, it was huge. Looks like Medivh had a thing for owls; the place is filled with statues of them, and some kind of strange human-shaped construct. I went up as close as I dared and they were covered in magic etchings, I don't even want to know how hard these things must be when they're awake. I tried to pry off some armour to take out but no dice.

I can see light ahead, looks natural. I don't want to think I'm not the first in here. My God maybe this is finally it, maybe it's him. Stop writing now kiddo, put that shit away and keep going. You're so close.

-xx-

_Log 8: 6__th__ Day_

I've found it.

-xx-

_Log 9: 6__th__ Day_

_[We can assume he found the main library, somehow. Unfortunately his diary was just basic parchment with no homing or beacon-spells on the pages, or we could triangulate from the location it was written and skip this entire process of exploration. I did not assume any student would be careless enough to attempt a solo climb, let alone so woefully unprepared. –E]_

_[Hindsight is 20/20, don't blame yourself. –J]_

My God it's huge. Every shelf's filled. Jackpot jackpot jackpot. Gods if I could set up a portal inside here I could throw them outside one by one and screw the tower, or Medivh, or the SMO. I could be the next Archmage with half of the books in this place. _[Sure, kiddo. –J]_ I'm going to make camp down here, it seems relatively safe if I set up some basic wards against those damnable wyrms. I think someone else is going around here, probably just a ghost.

-xx-

_[By this point a small strike-force from the local guild had managed to break through the ballroom into the tower, and we were already moving in behind them. Unfortunately the tower was already fully awake and aware on its lower floors and putting considerable effort into slowing us down, possibly the reason why he found the going so comparatively easy. –E]_

_[Not that we received much help from Teldrassil. –J]_

_[Our casters were occupied in Outland, with more important matters. –R]_

_[Ladies, please, other people are reading this. –E]_

-xx-

_Log 10: 10__th__ Day_

I only got out with my life, and I can't see a way back down. I can look into the library and see all those books just lying there, and those _things_ stomping all over them. I think I'm okay here for now though, I found a hidden passage on the map in the library and I'm sat in some kind of summoning study. The walls are thick as hell, good luck to those giant steel fuckers trying to get to me in here.

I can't see a way back down so I guess the only way now really is up, as far up as I can get until I can find something powerful enough to force my way down. This is a test, I can see it now. The old man's here alright _[He was not. –R]_ and he wants me to fight my way up, prove my worth. I can feel air coming from somewhere above me, that'll be my goal for tomorrow: Get to the window and get some real air inside me, not this dusty crap. There's a lot of stuff in this room, looks like it was some kind of hidden study. I recognise some of the older books, I think they're summoning texts. I know the SMO proscribed a lot of the nastier summoning spells but right now frankly I'll take what I can get.

-xx-

_Log 11 (?)_

_[Most of this log seems to have been written on the run. Only a few scribbles can actually be interpreted as words. The pages before contain some plan and sketches that seem to match what we have on Archmage Medivh's rituals, implying the young man attempted something far beyond his ability. I consulted with our…other half…down below Stormwind and it appears to match one of their older summoning rituals, discontinued for its extreme volatility and the intelligence and uncontrollable nature of the summoned…creature. If my worries are correct the current raid team might meet the results of this unfortunate event should they scale as high. –E]_

-xx-

_Log 12_

I shouldn't have done it. God, it hurts bad, and I've ran out of bandages, old robe isn't even tatters by now. Demon didn't even blink, just stepped through the constraining circle and tried to kill me. I had to leave all my things back with it, not that I had much to begin with in here. All I have now is the diary and what mana I have left I need for food. The room was small but it safe, and now here I am back 'outside'. This was a bad idea. I-

[_The current log entry continues on the third-next page, the intervening one having been ripped out. –E]_

-almost at the top I think. I'm not the first in here, I've seen them hiding behind the shadows. They look like mummies, although I don't recall mummies being quite so heavily armed. I have no idea how they got in here ahead of me but they're going to work on the few bookshelves they can reach and seem to be headed down. Hah, good luck to them. There's no way back down there alone, not without an army. Medivh's made sure I'm in this for the long haul now, it's just me and him, nobody else around to stop us _[He appears to have forgotten what he wrote literally seconds ago, although whether due to his own dementia or the Ethereal's memory-manipulation techniques I don't know. –J]._ I breathed real air for the first time in days and when I looked out I was miles up. There's power here like nothing else in the world and I want it badly, I want it I want it I want it. Let him throw what he wants at me, I'll master it and stand before him.

-xx-

_[It would be around this point we realised he was inside. The guild-team had breached the opera and was approaching the menagerie. Unfortunately the bumbling fool had activated the wards behind him, and we were having considerable trouble suppressing the protectors, ultimate stopping us from reaching the poor boy in time. –E]_

_[Poor my ass, we lost good people to the Curator. He's damn lucky 'his majesty' got to him before we did. –J]_

-xx-

_Log 13_

There's something above me. I can feel it like a mountain on the back of my neck, pressing down. Medivh's above me and he knows I'm close. I think he's surprised someone like me made it this far up. Past his bloody opera, past that fucking library death-trap, past the demons and the ghosts and everything else he's put in this tower. I can breathe in and taste the power _[Had the boy been of sounder mind he might have taken pains to identify the type of power he was approaching. Alas. –R]._ I'm going to sleep now, and tomorrow make the final push upwards.

-xx-

_Log 14_

He's showing me things, to prepare for our meeting. I can look out the windows this high up and I can see outside and there's nothing in the present that looks like that. I saw a giant blue dragon and he set it on fire from the inside like it was nothing, and the whole scene faded away. I saw dragon bones outside before I came in. It's his past. He wants me to understand something, but I don't know what yet. So tired now, running out of food. Can't cast any more. Have to reach the top now. Past last defences soon.

One more push.

-xx-

_Log 15_

Medivh can't play chess for shit.

_[I do not understand the meaning of this entry I must confess. Was the boy delusional? –R]_

_[An old, old story. –E]_

-xx-

I'm here.

Up the top. Nothing above me up but air and clouds and power on the other side of the door. Passed things that looked like they were chewed up and spit out and then someone gave them teeth. Like demons but failed. Once I am a god like him I will be able to fix it, fix so many mistakes. Wonder what others are doing, they must be inside by now. I will come down and show them what I know, show them I am better than I am. Show father how much better I am than my brother _[Oh. Well, that explains that at least. –J] [Inappropriate. –E]_. I have to stop writing now, no more need for this diary when soon I will write words with fire on stone. I can hear him on the other side of the door now, wants me to come inside. I will become everything and nothing, the tower has shown me visions of great things to come.

-xx-

_This is not the last entry but it is the last entry that is translatable or comprehensible, recovered from the library after the raiding team secured it for the Organisation. We can assume from the last_

_pages that the tower was leading him upwards towards the demon-prince in a futile attempt to remove the offending creature from its summit. Unfortunately Karazhan did not seem able to judge the boy's level of competence, only his lust for power. Conversations between SMO personnel with the tower's undead major-domo confirmed that Archmage Medivh had not returned, and Karazhan's expulsion of energy had been intended as a warning beacon rather than an invitation. Had the young mage-initiate taken the time to fully explore the lower levels before ascending to the dangerous upper floors he would have learned this quickly. Alas, the confidence of youth. He assumed he knew more than he did, he assumed he was more skilled than he was._

_The diary was recovered from one of the ghosts roaming the middle-floors. I hope it will serve as a lesson towards the more impressionable and impatient of our ranks on the risks inherent with thinking you know more than your instructors. You do not._

_Regards_

_Instructor Elsharin, Stormwind Mage's Organisation_

_Instructor Jeanna, Stormwind Mage's Organisation_

_Caster-General Ryhanda, Teldrassil  
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	6. A Thirst of Scales

I hate elves.

No, don't get me wrong laddie, I've worked and fought alongside elves most of my career, but I've never been able to trust 'em. Even back as far as I was a kid running around the forges in the smithies I was always told not to trust 'em with anything bigger than a sword or staff, else they'd just take it into their heads to go off and break something important. My dad told me, me maw, all the others of the guard and metalworks, and by the depths if all the years of my life haven't proved them right. Now, men I don't have so much of a problem with. They can be daft, aye, when the mood takes them, but they've got good hearts if they stop to think and use their heads alongside 'em. Wouldn't say a bad thing against the Gnomes either, they got dealt the worst hand I ever did see and it didn't slow them down for a moment. Even these new people who wandered down out of the void have got grit in 'em. Have to really considering this place they grew up on. But elves I've never trusted.

Seems like half the problems o' the world can be brought up and put right down on their tree-shaped doorstep. I've fought my way across both continents, those creepy ruins down in Feralas, the Deeps north past their forests, even took my shots in the Bug War, and the more I learn the more it looks like we're just picking up after their screw-ups. They think they know more than we do because they're so old, but I never met a man that didn't start to lose his marbles the older he got. One thought it would be a good idea to play at being a goddess and broke the world in two. Another thought he'd like the same and turned himself into a thing to rival the legion itself. No doubt as I'm speaking there's some quiet slip of a man or girl going around back on Azeroth thinking how much better things would be if only their idea would work. The age, you see. Strikes me by this time none of them can be playing with a full deck, and now here I am stuck in the middle of a giant hammer-damned lake, staring across into some gods-awful alien marsh, and it all goes back to the elves.

It started with that ship, although I don't see how you can call it a ship when it doesn't float. Or do anything else really, except burn. My brother Redum went across with the first exploratory team to Azuremist and he said there was some scary tech in that steel shell, really rough stuff. He helped patch up what he could and gave any help he had, bless his rocky little heart, and they repaid him with what they could. He was standing there when the regent accepted them into the Alliance and that was a proud moment for our family, having one of our kin be on the inside of something like that. The old King had asked him to bring back whatever he could and what he brought were a bunch of giant blue buggers. I remember thinking at the time I'd rather he'd brought back something pointy or something that shot fire, what with the troubles we were going through with the elemental invasions at the time, but it were for the good in the end. Funny thing, life. I went to Stormwind once a while back after the (crash) Landing and they were scattering about like someone had chopped their heads off and the body was still running around. Back then when the mages got nervous everyone got nervous and I took the opportunity to do some reconnoitring. I sat there listening to some kid half-and-half-again my age talk about portals and something called synchronicity. Most of it I didn't really care for, but he said that things tend to happen all at the same time. Between everything that's happened I reckon they might be on to something.

You kids would have been too young to remember when the Dark Portal was open the first time. These days the orcs aren't so bad. Honourable. You treat them right and they'll treat you right back, especially since Thrall got made Warchief. It's not like we're bosom pals or anything but if you see an orc on the road these days you can usually get away with a tip of the hat and keeping your hand off your sword, and he'll do the same. Back then though they were rabid. I lost three brothers in that last war, trying to drive them back through that cursed gate. In the end it was the humans that did it; poor bastards shut it alright, from the other side. If you go to the town over on south Hellfire you can see the gravestones of the ones that didn't make it past the hordes. Then you go west, and you end up here in this swamp, and there they are again.

They used to be elves you know, before the war. Oldest war there is, and guess whose fault. I never touch magic and for bloody good reason; you turn yourself into a beacon like that and you don't know what'll see it and wander over for a look. Well that old Queen and her cronies lit themselves up like candles and look who came calling.

It was a stretch just getting in here, I'll tell you that much. You all had it easy but we were the first to blaze that trail you followed and it was like a damn labyrinth I'll tell you. They must have known as were coming because I swear you'd have an easier time getting a gnome to give up his spanner than we did getting past that waterfall. I went across half the world and then some looking for the key to this place, up that damn mage's tower in Deadwind, north over the spikes at Blade's Edge and back again. We lost people, dead and surrendered, just to get the key. I've killed things that wanted to kill me back before but you cut down some of these things and they got right back up to have another go at you.

We did it in the end though. I was the first one through and let me say when that waterfall down there first parted I let out a sigh of breath, especially after the first time we were here _without _our little entrance-spell and the stream took little Hedrom's hand off at the wrist. Of course they had water to spare, water and little bloody else because that was their plan all along. Water and more water, and all the naga and elves they could find to guard the ringleader at the heart of it all.

It's a terrible bloody thing son, watching your people drown in front of you in mid-air. How to even hurt water anyway? We came up to some giant elemental, taking poison from the water and making it march off like an assembly line. Poor Calum walked up and touched it, all he did was a little fingertip-touch, and he was sucked in before we could anything. Just stared out at us as we tried to punch through and grab him, but the thing made currents inside its own body. We got it in the end, just stood back and let the mages scald it, but it was too late for the guy by then. Not even a corpse we could kick.

I hate water now, bloody hate it. It felt like slime down there, like water shouldn't. It was boiling hot too, we had one of the priests, just a lass, picked up and thrown in by a naga like she weighed nothing. She tried to swim out and by the time she reached something she was practically cooked. I told young Aaron to take her out – kid was always sweet on the lass – and I don't think either of them are ever coming back through that portal to Outland. They got the best of it in the end I reckon. It was alive, the entire place. We moved through the rooms and we'd look down and see…something. Currents in the water that were following us, just waiting for one slip and they'd grab on and pull us down. Forget the fish in that place, the _water_ wanted us dead.

Illidan was down there too. Not himself of course, he's still locked up in yon Temple to the south, but he had his watchers alright. We'd come around a corner and the blind one would be stand there, just watching. Swords just slipped around him like he wasn't there, couldn't land a goddamn hit on him no matter what we did. Demon Hunters are meant to hunt demons, and to do it they get a demon put inside them. Now the first time I heard this I knew something was up, because I've never met a Demon Hunter that wasn't already halfway-gone to the dark. This one was no different, except he hadn't even bothered toeing the line between good and evil, he'd just jumped right off. He was good, and fast. Fastest elf I ever seen. He wasn't even wearing any armour, and he didn't need it. In the end I think it wasn't even us that killed him, it was that demon they put inside him. It broke out and tried to take us down himself, just plain luck it had to break out through the elf. Not that he didn't take a few of us down with him. I'll never forget the look on Eran's face when his own shadow came alive and ate him. I got the last word in the end, scored my axe right through his face and while that place was like a nightmare I'll have no bad dreams from that kill.

We'd learned by this time of course, and by 'we' I mean the Alliance in general and the adventurin' guilds in particular. It had been years and years since the first raiders went down into Blackwing, years since the Bug War and the undead city. We were as ready as were going to be, the best they had to offer, and by that time if you were lucky enough for people to call you an adventurer you _were_ one of the best, because no guild-member who was stupid ever lived long. Our instructors, those brave lads and lassies who'd went into the necropolis the last time and lived, they told us to expect anything and everything, treat every step like you were going forward into knives. There was one woman, couldn't have been out of her third decade – human reckonin' – but she had eyes that were so much older. Some of the kids looked at her and saw a frightened little girl but I saw her looking back, and she knew she was looking at fools and new blood. My granddad before he died told stories about being in the Succession Wars back before the Bronzebeards ruled Ironforge. He talked about passages mined to collapse on his comrades and the fire down at the heart of mountains they fought above, and how many times he'd come close to being wiped away and had dodged death by inches. When he talked about the things that happened centuries back, looked around at some of the 'warriors' these days who think all you need to be a hero is an axe and helmet, he had eyes like she did. I listened to every word those warriors said and I took them to heart, just looking at some of those people who'd been inside the jaws of death and walked back out you could see they'd seen the beast and lived, and they didn't want us to make the same mistakes they had. They were different from us. I was already an old man by human years and I'd been in my fair amount of scraped but I knew this was different and I took every step forward like it was onto eggshells. Think that's why I'm out here instead of dead and down there. One human – don't even remember his name – stepped onto a puddle, just a bloody puddle. Outside you got your boots wet but down in the Cavern that tiny little puddle rose up and grabbed him by the leg and whisked him off the side before we could get our hands on his collar. We lost Othar when he took a step too far and got a mouthful of water falling from the ceiling. Damn stuff _flowed_ into his mouth before he realised what had happened and choked him from the inside, left him drowning on dry land. I don't drink water now if I possibly can, lucky the beer in Ironforge is so damn good. I don't think some of the humans were so lucky though. I visited Areth a while back and the poor girl was thin as a rail, skin looked like dried paper. Couldn't touch anything liquid, no idea how long she's going to last but she's with her family at least and not at the bottom of that unholy lake.

We fought our way through of course. Did it in two shifts, even. God bless those Draeni because they were waiting for us outside the waterfall-entrance and they had hot food and a solid pint held out to every one of us that came out, and that was around half of those who went in. Yeah I can see your face but half was _good_ compared to some disasters we'd heard about. A group from a new guild – daft buggers thought the best way to make a name was to run before they could crawl – went north to try and take down Gruul, they came back in pieces. A handful out of twenty-plus, and the rest turned into bones in Gronn-shit. A bunch of the Draeni watchers came back in with us when some of the original raid-team refused to go back in (and I heard some nasty words towards them but I didn't blame them), and I was grateful. Had their planet blown up from under them, dealing with elves from the south and giants from the north, and still had time for our problems. It took three days to beat our way through those defences. I'll always remember the people we lost fighting to the core of that watery hell, but we had our share of moments to. I'll always remember with a smile when a naga raiding party tried to escape, only to find our boys up there at the exit waiting for them. Ever seen that cheese the humans make, with the holes in? We killed a giant too. Huge bugger, practically covered in barnacles, but we sawed him up piece by piece, him and his tiny murloc minions. We beat them back inch by inch and made them pay double for every one of us they took down into the waters. Then we were there, suddenly. Broken and sodden aye but we were there all the same. Viriam did the honours and I think she was as surprised as anyone when that drawbridge came up and suddenly it was us and her.

She'd been an elf once, you could tell. Something about that arrogance was still there even though she was practically feral by the time we reached the altar, all scales and teeth and snakes in her hair. You should have seen the tech she had around her. Calling water up and making it move and kill with just a thought. A shield that made her skin like iron and nothing we did got through it – Light and the ancestors I wish we'd been able tor recover _that._ Makes me wonder where we could be right now if they did something constructive with all that power. I told you the entire place was alive, well that sea-queen was where it was coming from. She sat up there looking down at us, and we were three dozen against her one and she didn't even bat an eyelid. That elfish arrogance, right? It broke the world in two, drove how many of them mad from greed or pride, made the big man himself down in Shadowmoon Valley. It's like some kind of curse they carry.

We killed her, eventually. No need to go into details I think, I'm not like some of your people who dress them up in stories and tell them over campfires. I know a lot of my comrades do it too, but I never saw the glory in death, ours or anyone else's. We fought, we won, she died, and the second she did you could feel it in the air. Like _it_ died with her, and all the vapour, fog, and the massive lakes underneath, whatever spirit infested it died as well and turned it all back into just so much water. It all just…fell apart. I mean hell you can look around us right now on the lip of this lake and see it, not a wave in sight, and all of these hydras just sat there at the bottom of the water, dead. There's no life in this water anymore. I hope it does some good for the rest of this broken bloody planet. Put back whatever she was taking out to use for whatever elves use with unlimited power.

Now there's my story. I promised I'd tell you what I was doing all the way out here and a dwarf keeps his promises. Now, as a right honourable member of the Alliance that is allayed with you, the noble and courageous Horde, I request that you bring your little boat a little closer and _get me off this gods-damn island!_


	7. A Handful of Stardust

For most people it wouldn't be a problem. Other people had dreams like _I want to be _strong or _I want to be smart_ or _I want to be powerful and famous._ What do you when a little girl tells you she wants to travel up into the sky? To go to the stars and see what's there? I've told the others about it sometimes, tried to get it across to them, but none of them ever really understood what I was trying to say. Mother always said I had my head up in the clouds, after sixteen years of her saying it I finally figured out a decent reply; _just means I can see the stars clearly._ See mother, I was right in the end, in more ways than you knew. I'm closer than I've ever been and they're beautiful, even alien stars are beautiful. I can feel the curve of the warm metal roof underneath my back, even through the blood pooled there. I can taste the arcane energy still running through the old Draeni-etched steel and there's enough that I can siphon to keep me awake and without pain. The battle below is quieter now, I'm not sure if that's good or bad. If the worst has happened and Sabine and Orstrag and the others are already dead then this might not be such a bad place to join them. They're not the ones from my home planet but at least I'll die under starlight, and all this temple will be my tomb.

-xx-

I was born to be a mage, my father always knew it even if my mother was never convinced. All Blood Elves can 'do magic' if you consider heating up the air around your body on a chilly day magic. A few of us have it though; a real talent, and the Bloodmages are always on the lookout. Other children were learning how to spell _cat _and _door_ and I was already looking past it at the bigger books that lined the shelves, the ones for the older classmen and apprentices. I didn't know what was in them, or how hard it would be to learn. I looked from my tiny little picture-books to those tomes and just knew there was knowledge inside and I wanted it. Later when I was older I went back and opened one just to see and laughed myself silly when I found out _Maintenance of Wooden Furniture and Buildings_ wasn't the mystical arcane teachings the five year-old me had thought they were. As a symbol they worked fine though, and my teachers never knew what to do with me. I had talent that shone like a sun and no matter how many labels they stuck on me to try and bring me into line with the other children – _wilful, troublemaker, sneaky_ – eventually they saw through it and sent out for the other school to pay me a visit. My father beamed when the representative arrived at the house.

He was old, even a sixteen year-old fool like myself could see it. In humans and gnomes age is easy; they wrinkle and fall apart as the years press down like heavy stones on their backs. Taurens and orcs harden and turn leathery as the world tries to break them and only makes them hard instead. The undead are past age and simply ignore it. We're most similar to our moonlit cousins; static, unchanging so long as the necessary energies are provided. You can still tell though, if you know how to look. The mage-commander they sent to me was like any other Blood Elf from the Silvermoon Guard, all hard edges and lines. He had something more though, something not in the strutting soldiers that stood around the city guarding the palace and gates. He had power and he knew it. I was young and desperate to learn and I could see it easily, the years shimmered around him and the arcane power mixed in. It was an act, I learned later when we were more than teacher and student, but back then I was utterly convinced. I'll never forget his first words to me, and he had a voice like a god as he spoke:

_Aesha of House Lightweave, you have been chosen._

I didn't see my parents again for ten years. Ten years of hard learning and painful practise, confusing theory and endless, endless patience. Other students walked the halls of the academy with little more than hot air and some small level of skill to keep them afloat, wanting the aura of celebrity of the mage-corps more than they cared about actually being one, spending the weeks making a token attempt at the tests they were set and spending the nights and weekends in bars, the silver-and-gold symbol of the corps on their lapels. I was nothing like that. All my life I had looked up at the stars and wanted to be there and now here I was, being promised by hard old men and women that if I was good enough and worked hard enough, if I had the _talent_, I could call them down and make them dance on my palm. I was no ascetic but I had little time for the indulgences our race is known for. Most of the men – boys really – of the academy were more intimidated than impressed when presented with an actual fervour for learning, and most of the ones who humoured me found out it wasn't an attempt at playing hard-to-get. I didn't miss them. The feeling of the raw power of the elements flowing through my fingertips, striking out to heal or command as I saw fit, the energy to control the world itself, was better than anything physical they could have provided. After the final tests of the final year there were less than half of our original class left. Some had dropped out, simply not enough of a spark to go on, and many of those went honourably into the other disciplines. Others left in disgrace, their shot at glory wasted. I left the academy the top of my class, as if for the final year there had been any doubt, and was first in line when our badges of office were bestowed upon us. That was the first and only time I met the Prince.

If the old man who had brought me to the academy all those years ago had been powerful, the Prince was beyond it. It cascaded from him and for a second I wondered why we weren't overwhelmed and engulfed in it, the arcane power seeming to simply fall away from him in waterfalls of golden light. All a trick, but back then I had no idea who Kael'thas Sunstrider truly was, only that the prince of my people stood before me and he was magnificent. He handed me the emblem of the Mage-Elect with a smile and when my fingertips touched his I felt it. Pure arcane power ran along my arm and uncoiled into me and for a moment I knew what I was to have talent beyond talent. Talent enough to shape the world. It only lasted a second but I was already half in love before he moved on to the next person in line. If my dreams hadn't been scratched into my soul by ten years of learning – _to the stars – _I might have stayed. But they were, and I didn't. I left the city a month later. I didn't want to be one more guard patrolling the streets of the already-martial city. I wanted to go out into the world and find a way off it.

These days we curse the prince's name and laying here on top of this temple to ancient gods, life bleeding out into an alien night, I curse it as well. But I'm here because of him, and I suppose that part of me that felt the power and wanted it will always thank him that he ran here, and dragged us out to chase him.

-xx-

Everyone says they know where they were when the Dark Portal opened again, but for me it was the ship. That beautiful, gorgeous ship. It had been years after I'd left Silvermoon, years since I'd met the Prince. We were desperate then, searching as fast as we could for a way to sate the hunger inside us. The civilians and nobles in the city saw their dwindling reserves of arcane power, saw the twisted echoes of their friends who fell to the addiction, saw the dark eyes that stared out at them from inside the new fel-energy crystals and screamed out to the army and Bloodmages for a solution _now now now._ Our ranger-squad was in the north of Kalimdor as close to Teldrassil as they dared, to try and find out whether our cousin's moonwell's could be used or adjusted to help sate the hunger, and that's why I was there on the hillside. We had stopped for the night and I had found the highest hill I found, laid back on the cool grass staring up into the night, picking over the stars up there one by one and naming the constellations I could see. Wondering what else was up there, whether there were people up there looking up at their skies, towards us.

Then the Exodar fell out of heaven and screamed across the sky, and I was answered.

Geography meant we lost our chance. If it had crashed half a day later it would have been floating off our shores and not Teldrassil's roots. By the time help was sent from the East – and the wrong kind of help, they brought us spies and military agents where they should have sent food and diplomats – we had already lost the race. I could see by the sleek elvish ships that sat in the waters off the coast where the ship had come down. I was still in love though. Unlike the humans or dwarves I didn't see a ruined hull that sat half-buried now in the side of a mountain, belching smoke and fire into the sky. I looked at it and saw what it had been. A hull to travel the stars. I'd have joined the Alliance if I could, I think, just to get access to the Exodar. Certainly I spent nights thinking about how to get on board. Eventually I realised drastic steps had to be taken.

My father screamed bloody murder, my mother pleaded to reconsider, my old teacher and once-lover shook his head but said he bore no malice about my choice. He saw it even if my parents didn't, that what I needed now was something more than what the Bloodmages could offer. I resigned my commission and left the golden spires of Silvermoon for the last time, and made the long journey back across the sea, to Orgrimmar. The centre of the world, and the home of the guilds. My last words to my father were that I would make him proud of me again, and I'm almost certain he heard.

My vision is getting cloudy and there's a buzzing I can't clear from my head, but the fighting below inside the Eye is finished now. All I can hear is the wind, and above me a sky dotted with lights. If we won then it's over, our rotten prince is dead and maybe Blood Elves can begin to redeem ourselves in the eyes of the gods of this broken planet. If they failed I'll still take comfort that we hurt him badly before we fell. If Kael'thas goes to his balcony and looks out across the Netherstorm now he'll see nothing but broken and melted steel where his planet-devouring engines once stood, and the corpses of dead soldiers instead of his demonic legions. Then the next attempt will be made, and another, and another until he falls.

-xx-

They were my new family and I loved them. This was the drive and passion I'd never met inside Silvermoon, where the civilians were content to spend their ways lounging in plush chairs and sucking arcane power from hookahs, and the military happy to patrol the brighter lanes and pretend the dark alleys didn't exist. The guild was hungry, for adventure and money and fame. We walked halfway up the world and back and I saw so much more than I'd ever thought possible. Three years I proved myself and bided my time and waited and waited. Waited until finally I was strong enough and next in line, and finally without fanfare or pomp I was presented with a scrap of paper, with a single sentence on it that meant the world to me.

_Go speak to Dar'toon in BL. He'll tell you where to go._

My heart stopped when I read it. Sabine and Orstrag and others from the old crews had gone south to Dar'toon, and come back talking about what they'd seen. I'd never get into the Exodar, not as a guild member, but this was the next best thing. I wouldn't go onto their ship, but I would go to their home.

I took a step through that raging green inferno, and the foot that stepped off on Azerothian soil landed on the hot red dust of Outland. Beneath new stars. I had made it.

I fought demons inside the blue-tinted darkness of the Shadow Labyrinth with Sabine, her cold dry hand in mine as her undead eyes saw through the gloom to the whirling god trapped at its centre. I gasped and spluttered my way through the depths with Haudron and the Day Crew, the poor Tauren's fur growing steadily soggier and heavier as we waded through the naga's reservoirs under Zangarmarsh, looking for an entrance into their queen's lair. I travelled back through time –_ I travelled through time – _with Orstrag and his team to meet the greatest mage that had ever lived and fought alongside him in a dream I still doubt was real.

And I went north, to paradise.

Every Blood Elf on Outland knew by then, and we were ashamed. It was personal. Voren'thal argued tooth and nail with the Aldors and Khadgar to be the first boots on the ruined ground of the Netherstorm, and when the Scryers touched down we weren't far behind. The orcs, tauren, humans, dwarves, all of them were there for the glory and honour and reputation they'd accrue. But the Blood Elves were there because it was a stain on our entire race. We looked out over the land that broke apart as we watched, the only greenery coming from the heavily-shielded oases of the Ethereal trading posts, and saw the marks from the elvish machinery dotting the landscape. Sabine asked me what was wrong and I lied to her, it wasn't travel that had made me feel so wretched, or the ground that heaved and gently moved as we watched. It was knowing that one of our own was doing this, someone we'd worshipped until what felt like only yesterday. The Ethereals passed on messages and we got the news up here when they tore up the floorboards of the Blood Knights temple and found the captive god beneath.

I was picked for the assault. Me and Ruarch and Sabine and two dozens of the best the Horde had to offer, and we went in. The Prince still had his fanatics and guards and even though I and the other elves of the platoon screamd at them _stop stop stop he's lying he's not what you think he's a monster_ they didn't yield, so we cut them down. We moved through the temple and everywhere I stepped I stepped past the body of people who could have been comrades or friends in another life. Blood stained the walls of that beautiful place. I loved the Eye from the moment I saw it, in the same way I had loved the Exodar, and Kael'thas had turned it from a temple of lights into a temple of fed and green fire, like a giant narcissistic mirror. It was built to be occupied by gods and their priests and everywhere we went inside we saw the things they'd left behind when Kael'thas had taken rooms that I had to crane my neck to see the summit of, walls covered in symbols and colours that danced as I ran my hands across them, a language I desperately wanted to learn. Control rooms that had once piloted the massive place across the land and through space had been taken over and converted into storage for clumsy bipedal machines that belched smoke and fell apart as soon as we touched them, the fluids that had powered them seeping into the floors and ruining them. We met a woman driven mad with power, twisted in on herself until she was a giant black hole that could only kill. We slew the phoenix that Kael kept in a room that could have been a ballroom or a gathering-place or an altar, the curtains and carvings burned away as the giant firebird flapped its way dumbly across the room. Everywhere he'd torn down the beautiful works from those gods of light and replaced the tapestries and decorations with his own twisted ideal of beauty.

We've won, I can hear the cheers. Good. If the priests are right and there is a hell, I hope that the rotten creature I once obeyed rots there forever. We found him on a throne at the height of the tower, looking down on the cracked planet below like he was some kind of god, surrounded by his last followers. He hadn't changed a bit, not all those decades since I had graduated from the mages academies and shook his hand, felt that power flowing through him. I wonder if I shook his hand now, what kind of energy would I feel? He'd sold his soul half a dozen times, broken natural laws like twigs in the thirst for power. Even six against two dozen didn't seem to break that air of superiority he carried like a cloak, as he sent his generals against us. I remember steel whirling through the air and bombs that scuttled underfoot like rats to explode and tear off feet and legs. I remember weapons that moved on their own or held by invisible hands, weaponry of unthinkable power. I saw Sabine fighting off a dagger – _a dagger – _that whirled around her like a wasp, slicing and cutting as her own knives fought them off. I saw my friends cut down by nothing. And then they all rose up again, Kael'thas' hands dancing like a puppet-master to raise his servants for one last dance before he would have to stoop to face us himself. And I can feel the fire against my chest, when the world exploded around us and Kael finally realised that it was his time, that we were here and we were going to kill him and all his borrowed demonic power might not be enough to get him out of this one. Glass and stone poured through the air, and it was pure dumb luck I saw the prince first, saw where he was pointing with liquid fire in his hands. Poor Ruarch, you were always so brave and steadfast, but that armour weighed you down so much. If that's you cheering down there then don't blame yourself. I stood between you and hellflame and I would do it again in a second. You were my brother.

It's getting darker. The stars above are moving, dancing almost. They're getting darker and fading and moving away but I don't want them to go. I want to reach a hand up, try and drag myself closer, but my body feels like lead. So tired.

I'd have liked to be there for the final strike. I can picture it in my head. Orstrag or Ruarch or one of the other fighters holding the blade to his throat. My old prince looking up into the eyes of such an inferior creature as an orc and knowing what was coming. The blade slices down through his body and I can see him fall to the floor dead.

I hope someone takes me home. I hope I'll be remembered somehow when they take home our Prince's body. Let the Blood Elves know that among the names of their redeemers were Ruach Stormtotem and Sabine Hutchkinson and Orstrag Gromagh, and that Aesha Lightweave was there with them. I hope the Draeni can forgive us I hope they bury me with my family I hope this broken world can start to heal I hope-

See father, I told you I would make you proud.

I hope there are stars where I'm going.


	8. A Maze of Nothing  I

I am the throsn in the earth.

I am the salt in the water.

I am the chill in the wind.

I am the heat in the fire.

I am the one who watches as you awaken and stumble from your home into the light of day to find your village burned, the secret hand that points to the man by your side and the gold in his pocket, the whisper in your ear that tells you of the world's misdeeds against you.

I am the eyes that watch as you climb from your bed of rationality and science into the world of magic and superstition. I am the strings that make them dance and shout and rip and tear and I am the urge that command you to kill them.

I am the greed in the eyes of the long-eared queen as she gazes into the abyss and sees power there she does not own, the desire in her heart as she reaches for it and brings chaos and more souls from the bleeding twisting nether into my domain. I am the horror and pain she feels as she is taken by those burning legions down into the depths of the new splintered world she has created.

I am the wonder that catches the hearts of the green-skins as they walk through their dark portal an gaze on the endless fields of my world. I am the frenzy that grips them as they hack and chop and burn their way into a place they call home and I am the fear that grips the hearts of man as they watch.

I am the envy in the eyes of one who looks at his brother and sees fame and worth that he thinks should be his. I am the anger that feeds into his body and twists it in anger as he struggles past limits none should break to achieve his thirsts, and I am the sorrow and betrayal he feels when they chain him down for his transgressions.

I am the whisper in his ear as he rots in the ground. I am the fuel that keeps the fires of his hatred for those still above alive and smouldering, hidden but always ready to flare with the slightest provocation. I am the womb that keeps his underground prison safe and unharmed.

I am the reckless thought that commands the lady to seek out the spurned brother, to bring back the transgressor into the light of day, to try and convince him with words of forgiveness. I am the mist that prevents those words from reaching his heart as they carry him out, and I am the fury that he feels as they command him to use those skills they once imprisoned him for.

I am the worm of arrogance that bade the young prince tell the brother of the skull that would fulfil his every desire for power, and I am the thirst that bade him drink from it. I am the anger that banished him from the land and I am the resentment and pride that made him scorn his family. I am the cowardice that made him kneel before the burning lords that haunt his long-eared race and I am the spark of hope that made him swear his loyalty to them.

I am the hubris that called up the drowned queen's forced and I am the desperation that made the sea-witches obey the brother. I am the fury in the jailer that chased him across the world and I am the ambition that told the brother he could achieve everything his own family could not. I am the voice that led him to the broken ends of the world and the horn that gathered his servants to him.

I am the stubborn heart that refused to die and fled away, my blood still flowing through his veins. I am the voice that warned him as his jailer caught him, the watcher as he begged for mercy of his new fel gods and the beacon that led his final allies to him. I am the joy that drove him as he crushed the lords of that land underneath his boots and drove them into chains.

I am the ground under him as he stepped back through the dark portals onto his own world with his new army, and I am the wind that drove him north to the frozen heart of the undead kingdoms and the humiliated fury that made him throw his blades against their champion. I am the blade that broke against the fury of Frostmourne and the limping pathetic remnants of desire that made him flee on his knees rather than die on his feet.

I am the eyes behind his eyes as he fled me and went back, back to that other world to lick his wounds clean, the bile in his mind as he raged and stewed in his own failure. I am the shadow that looks down on him as he stands at the summit of his temple and stares back up at me on his home. I am the grinning teeth he imagines he sees there. I am the fear that deepens his madness and sends his allies away and makes a prison of his own castle, and himself as his own jailer.

I am the one who cannot abide his possessions taken from him.

I am the whispers in the ears that bring knowledge of his self-made jail back to the ground I am in, and the spark of hope and pride and excitement that runs through the thoughts of those who hear it. I am the greed that makes people pick up their arms and walk south to where my wayward plaything has fled, one step across the endless stars.

I am in the blood and flesh of the upright beasts that call themselves man and dwarf and elf and tauren as they step through that portal after him.

I am the pride and greed in their minds as they walk to assault their wayward cousin, sat in his blackened throne.

I am in the swords and armour that they wear as they tear down his walls around him, as they slaughter his final guards and dismantle his final engines, and seal his every escape behind them. I am in the edges of their blades as they prise apart the ancient fortress brick by brick to bring their justice and my wishes to him.

I am the one who looks down on them from the sky as they tear his wings and shatter his magics and rend his blades apart and claim their kill and bring him back to me.

I am the one who watches as they take his remains and plunder and travel back under the green ruined skies to the great gate that leads to my skies and seas and soil.

I am the relief they feel in their bones as they step back onto my land.

I am the air in their lungs and I am the blood in their veins.

I am the wind in their hair.

I am the deep sleeping thoughts of the world.

I am…


	9. A Maze of Nothing II

I'm scared.

I never thought I'd say that again, not now, not after so much.

I've fought gods and demons, travelled through the worst this ruin of a planet could throw at me and came out the other side stronger and harder. I've outlasted a dozen suits of armour and as many swords and through it all I've never been afraid, but standing here now looking at this…creature it's there again, an emotion I thought I'd left behind when I was just a lad chasing the wolves from our family farm.

I'm afraid.

-xx-

I'm the one they always point to when you come into the yard for your first drills. Me and my friends, those of them still alive, are the ones in the back measuring and weighing as you file in. I know most of you have heard the stories and read the papers, and you think it's because we hate you personally that we stare at you like you're so much meat. That isn't the reason though. We were all new blood once. I was in the Stormwind guard when the old guild leader before the last one before this one clapped me on the shoulder and told me to come to him if I ever wanted a real job, an when I joined I was in your shoes, filing into the guild yard, watched by the old hands. We don't hate you because you're the latest in the line of hopefuls.

The problem is the idea you represent. You're all new blood, and it's right there in the word; new. You've been scouted or noticed from whatever backwater town you came from and you're here in our guild now to replace old blood. But to us they're not just old blood, they were comrades and friends and lovers that we fought beside and laughed with and cried with, and then lost. They're gone and they've left a hole in our hearts and in the ranks, and holes eventually get filled. The idea that some kid could come in here, to our world, and try to fit into that slot is just out of line. We'll fight together eventually but for now we're looking at you and seeing someone that could never measure up to what they were.

So we look you over and try to see the weak links before we have to put you in the chain we call a guild. One has a bad leg he's trying to hide; he'll get through basic on sheer guts but won't make it through advanced and we'll have to gently take him aside before he cripples himself trying. Another has eyes that're skittering around in his skull; he signed up for the glory, he didn't realise how bad it would get, probably joined up to impress a girl and we'll find some made-up reason to let him down gently. Another is staring back at us, and even before Kettil's nudged me to point him out I can see it. That one has a killer's eyes. We'll see how far he gets and take him out of the group before he hurts anyone around him, not that it will stop him. He'll move from guild to guild until one of the newer outfits mistakes that red gleam for enthusiasm, and he'll be through the Dark Portal one way or another. If we meet out over there, out where the Alliance's laws don't reach, he had better watch his ways or he'll fall with a knife in his back and not his chest.

We took what we could, spent the time we could helping the guild trainers before we had to go back. Because the old hands always knew when something big was coming; they sent us home for 'cadre training', really just a polite way of telling us to go home and take a break. We'd finished up in the Eye a few weeks back, cleaning up the Netherstorm after the Horde team that got the kill. I don't begrudge them it either. Don't get me wrong I'd have killed to be in the team that went in, but they say you have to shoot your own dog, and the blood elves had a hell of a dog to shoot if you get my meaning. So we were hired as cleanup, not that cleanup in Outland is a milk run. All of the odds and ends that the kill-teams miss we have to deal with, and the Ethereals and Shattrath paid for a lot of cleanup. A month we spent there, throwing demons off the edge of the world and tearing down elvish machinery. Then they told us to go home and sleep it off. They always made sure we were well and rested before they threw us into the grinder.

And what a grinder it was going to be.

-xx-

I think some of knew it in our hearts before our brains. The Draeni recruits especially, they could feel it pull at them whenever we ran missions on Outland. Sometimes when we were in a quiet spot I'd catch them looking south from the corner of my eyes. I asked Dromund once what was there, and he just shook his head and said _our soul. _I found out later, went and asked the barflies in Shatt what they meant, and got my answer. Poor bastards. We were busy with the nagas in the swamp and the bloody (heh) elves to the north, but until this last month in Outland the guild had never taken missions south. Finally the whispers from clerks turned into words from superiors, and we knew there was a plan and sooner or later one of the higher-ups would look at it and say 'fine' and the order would come down.

The Black Temple. The map was on the wall and I'd swear the breath from all those gasps could have lifted a dirigible into the sky. It wasn't just the Draeni in our guild either, there were half a dozen of the big names in there. The city had pooled every copper they had and posted out all the way to Kalimdor for talent, and we were rubbing shoulders with names and faces we'd all told stories about from both sides of the war. We'd squeeze past each other in the halls and kept our mouths shut and thought of the money, and hoped like hell we'd not have to be side-by-side when the time came. I'm no crazed zealot, spitting blood at the orcs whenever I see them, and I'm Reclaimer shouting for Undercity's destruction at every step, no .At my age you've either learned better or you're a corpse, but I'd still rather play with my own team.

Now standing here at the thing above me, looking back I'd have wrapped my hands around them and called them brother and sister, if it had meant a few more swords by my side at this moment.

-xx-

I always wonder with a place like this, what they could have done if they had tried. I've been through castles held in mid-air by magic I couldn't see, endless tons of water held at bay by glass it looked like I could crack with a finger. I've seen endless energy being pumped through machines built only to rip and kill. Maybe when I was a kid I'd have been awed and shocked and hungry to make my own, but after decades of fighting, years of watching good friends and brave men and women cut down by these things, I just wonder why. What could these people do if they had turned this power to good instead of bad? If all these people want is power why don't they just give us their toys and ask for it? The gnomes and dwarves turn out their small miracles and we raise them up as heroes, why wouldn't we do the same for them?

It wasn't a long brave charge through the front gate like the stories all say it should go. We fought our way in through the sewers, wading through the muck and grime inch by inch. Snakes and alligators and things with more teeth than they should have ate at us every step of the way. We lost good people before we even made it to the surface, fighting against a crazed beast that could have been a naga once and was now some mad thing made out of slime and bones and razor-sharp edges. Aron died taking it down, slamming his sword through it's skull even as the water around him sucked the air from his lungs. It took us a day to crawl through that muck and darkness and when we finally came out into the light we saw the other side of the doors that we had fought to reach. All that effort, five dead, and we had made it twenty metres. Still we went on. When the councilmen in Stormwind complain about why our prices are so high, that's the reason. We go on.

The Broken helped us, gods and the light bless them. They must take their name from their bodies because their spirit is anything but. We fought the shade of their leader and when he was free he thanked me and called me brother, and all the people inside the antechamber of the temple cheered us so loud I think the thing on the black throne far above heard them. I'd like to think he felt a twinge of fear, but staring at him now I know that isn't true.

-xx-

We lived here for that week, using the gathering hall as our base. There were over a hundred of us by then when the _other_ guilds arrived in our wake, before the doors were blasted shut, and we got along as well as we could. There'd be a fight sometimes when a human would recognise a scar-pattern on the orc beside him he'd seen weeks or months ago across a battlefield, but we kept it clean. Professional. We picked our battles and even made wagers with some of the ones who spoke Common. After the first wing, when we fought through that group of old Death Knights and met their leader, we all had a black sense of humour, or we'd have broken down. We left too many up there, fighting that ancient warrior. I met his eyes for half a second and it was half a second too long. Some others more than that it and cost them, it cost them dearly. We caught him out, took him down the ground and then hacked at the thing until it was nothing more than scraps of cloth and gristle, and we turned and saw what he'd done to our friends and almost gave up right then. There was nothing we could do for them and they knew it. He'd called up ghosts to fight for him and somehow – maybe the air in that place, maybe the sheer flow of necromantic power flowing around him – kept our fallen there too, fighting back what we couldn't. We looked at those ghosts, their bodies still warm on the floor, and we knew there was nothing we could do. We had to leave them there, and I hope when the clerics come and this place is cleansed they can finally go on.

It was a shrine to madness. Creatures he'd culled from half a dozen conquests and twisted and warped with the power he'd been given by the Legion. For the third and fourth day, while we were planning ahead for the next push while the Horde guild took their turn at the tip of the spear, they'd come back less and less each time. We were soldiers together by then and they'd talk about the things they'd seen. An elf shouted at us about the orc they had fought and brought down, huge and glowing red with anger and rage, screaming so loud her eardrums had burst. Demons that walked the halls of the antechamber out past our guards. We'd fall asleep one night and wake up to find a patrol slaughtered, and no way of knowing how or why. We would walk the halls and the man by us would drop dead, by an invisible assassins' blade or the life simply…sucked out of him.

I felt it a little bit as the days went on, like water trickling into a jug with no place to go. We'd fight orcs as tall as houses dressed in armour as thick as a tank, with blades where there hands should have been. I comforted Liomel as he lay dying, guts spilling out onto the ground from a blade he hadn't seen, and it filled a little more. We fought down a creature I can't describe, that I hope one day I won't remember. It was a whirling mass of faces; pain and sorrow and anger all twisted up into one metal thing that tried to break it's chains and crush us underneath it as ghosts and spirits poured into the arena and spat at us. We killed anything that crossed us, and every time my arm raised and fell to cut down another of the endless horde and my eyes saw another behind it that jug filled just a little more until finally I couldn't say that the shaking in my arm was tiredness.

I look up now and wonder how much longer it would have been before I broke. If the Draeni are right and the Naaru in the city are gods, I only thank Them that we made it here before I did. I'd rather die with my friends than run as a coward.

-xx-

When we got through we thought it was a trick, or an illusion somehow. I'm no cringing virgin, I've been in my share of brothels across the world, but this was something else. I could turn and look behind me at the bodyparts and blood we had fought through and the darkness in that temple, then look through the doorway we had finally broke open and see sweetness and light, and beckoning flesh everywhere.

Maybe the man still had desires, even mad and twisted and drunk on power. But if it was a trap it was exquisite. We lost people in there of course, like we lost people everywhere. We were used to seeing patrols go out and come back a man short, thought nothing of being paired up with a different partner every morning because the last one had died or vanished or simply given up the night before. Time had lost its meaning in that place, no light came in from outside. We could have been in a week or a month or two months. Even so we were still soldiers, still professionals, and we saw the knives hidden behind the perfumed robes. We killed our way up and through that harem. Whether they were ghosts or illusions or simply men and women we didn't care, they were in service to the black god at the summit of the temple and were forfeit because of it.

It was unbelievable up there. We'd fought our way in through slime and darkness, fought our way through madness and death and despair, and now here we were. What a sight we must have been when we came past those curtains into the light. I think of all of the elves were the angriest. We were barely a quarter of the number that had made it past the entranceway, covered in the blood of our friends and enemies, and now here we were confronted with what could have been a garden-party. The servants of the man lounging around in comfort, cushions and servants and food. Maybe if they had been screaming berserkers like the demons on the lower levels, or enslaved like the Broken that had given us everything they had when we'd torn away their chains. Maybe we would have stopped to ask. But it was obvious what had happened, and they knew we knew. Instead of prostrating themselves at the feet of Silvermoon and begging for mercy the defeated forces of Kael'thas had run from the Netherstorm to here, to their final master. They made their choice and died for it.

-xx-

I'm afraid. That jug just kept filling up as we climbed the final steps to this summit. I was never the best spellcaster of the guild – poor Elsie had that honour, and she died against the three-faced rock in the darkless below – but I think anyone with even a pinch of life in their bones can feel it. It's hatred. It isn't the dislike I felt watching the new blood file into the guild halls back on Azeroth. It isn't the scorn I felt for those too weak come out here, those guilds who were offered their chance, saw the risks for what they were and turned it down. This is hatred, and it knows we're here and it's focussed on us.

We took the final council down. They were living in comfort and luxury and we forced our way past their devices and constructs and guards and tore the heads from their shoulders. The last of them had begged for his life even as the link with his dead comrades killed him. We'd all filed in then, Alliance and Horde together, facing down the final door that stood between us and the summit. The dead woman called Sabine had just clapped me on the shoulder and said _it's time, it's fuckin' time,_ and as one we had agreed. I had felt it then, like a response to our own will. A wave of hatred and black magic wafted from that door like smoke. I'd heard stories about Illidan Stormrage. I'd met other Demon Hunters. I'd thought that I was ready. Then we walked through the door into the light, the planet above us – _Azeroth itself above us – _shining down. My eyes had met that green fire behind his bandaged face and the steadily-filling jug had finally split and cracked and broke open.

For the first time in my adult life I am afraid.

-xx-

We can't go back, not after everything. We would never be able to look each other in the eye again. This long dark time inside the Temple has sandblasted away the barriers between us. We're a family now, more than a guild. We know each other better than we know our own sons and wives and husbands and daughters. Even as he's staring at us, a snarl on his face and green fire in his eyes we know we can't do anything but walk forward and fight that evil thing.

I tighten the grip on my blade, the handle of my shield. I can't let that fear stop me, and I know everyone behind me, orc and man and dwarf and Draeni, are doing the same thing. That jug in my heart isn't in mine along, it's inside us all. But I know that won't stop us. We've fought though darkness and hell and false light to get to this black heart, and nothing so small as fear will be enough to stay our blades. This is why the old hands are so harsh to the new blood, why the guilds take out those weak links. To forge an unbreakable chain. I step forward and raise my blade against the raging storm, and I know that behind me my comrades are doing the same.

As one, we strike.

Unafraid.


	10. A Glance of Power

I mean you have to understand I never really cared that much about the whole scene. Is that the word? That's pretty much what everyone in the SMO thought about it anyway. 'Kid stuff'.

The only mages who volunteered for the guilds didn't exactly shine compared to the real ones is what we always told ourselves, and we had proof to back it up. All the dead ones, for a start, and that kid who went into Kara and never came out. We thought we were doing them a service, like when you're a kid and your mother tells you stories to keep you away from doing bad stuff. You can't understand it when you're young so they make up tall tales; "make sure you wash every morning or the Dirt-Goblins will smell you out and kidnap you", only for us it was "if you join a guild and go outside the walls you'll die a miserable death". Admittedly our language was a little harsher, but then the students were older. Still didn't stop them though. Out of every fifty we'd lose a dozen or so, in dribs and drabs, when they thought they could make something of themselves with the guilds. We'd write them off and talk about lost potential and when they turned up dead or worse we wouldn't say anything, just make sure the kids knew so-and-so had gone off with big dreams and come back in a pine box. If they came back covered in wealth and riches we just kept quiet and hoped no-one noticed.

Of course of course, I'm getting there. Just some background you understand. Comes from being a lecturer I suppose, the urge is always to follow my job description. Please bear with me, tidying up this little study is hard enough with only a single set of fingers.

-xx-

It had to have been ten or so years ago, but I remember it clearly. This was after the Temple of the Naaru was recovered and the guilds brought back – and sold – the artefacts the Draeni had let them haul off. They had opened it up for any academic or pilgrim who wanted to make the journey but of course I'd never considered even leaving the city, let alone Azeroth, no matter how much traffic went through that portal. I don't trust them. I stayed in the Mage Tower and wrote my reports, and I suppose one of them caught someone's eye because a few weeks later I was…conscripted? Hired is too mercenary a word I feel. Recruited, there.

Again you have to understand, we never really felt the rivalry – yes of course maybe too light a word for it, but that was how it was for us – the rivalry between the Alliance and the Kalimdor races. We had regular exchanges of information and the portals were direct, no need to have…unfortunate incidents from them travelling through the city. I remember it was old Talen Lightweave who approached me. He was quite direct, I find most males of his species are. He wanted some of us to come on an expedition to the north and he was willing to pay in artefacts and other miscellanea of the profession. I hesitated because Talen had a…reputation, but he was quite persuasive. A small force of soldiers backing up a research and reclamation cadre. He said he was researching elven arcane magic. He didn't tell me what he was reclaiming it from, however.

Of course now I know why he was going. The poor man, I fear revenge was a higher priority for him at that point than his thirst for knowledge. I looked into the matter when we returned from the…from the plateu. History does tend to miss us here in the Tower I feel, but some small items recovered from the Eye had passed through my hands without my knowing where they had come from. I wonder whether any of them had been hers.

Unfortunately back then I wasn't nearly as thorough in my investigations. Now that I'm missing a hand I find the other turns far more pages than it had before. I met the man on Stormwind's dock a week later. From there we travelled north, to meet up with the rest of the gang he had hired, and I had my first surprise of the voyage.

First of many.

-xx-

It was a rude awakening and I will admit not my finest hour. I was not the only mage recruited by Lightweave but I will admit to being the least-capable, and please do not tell the Archmage I said that or I'll never hear the end of it. I was last from the boat when we made landfall and realised what the 'reclamation' part of the man's contract meant.

We were recovering it from the Legion. The Legion itself! I've studied more demons than most know exist and even then I've never seen creatures like that, and in such numbers. Talen was only one of many it seemed who had been hiring and our boat was met with a dozen, two dozen others when we came onto the Isle. There was no subtlety there, we simply ran the ships as far aground as we could as fast as we could, and rushed off into the chaos. Back then I flattered myself that I was a student of the Higher magics, my spells the most powerful and intrinsic of the SMO, but here there were children barely half my age doing things with mana I'd never seen. The dwarves say that war is the father of invention and my lords they were correct. A girl who couldn't have been in her second decade cut through elves with some enchantment I could barely see, another weaved in and out of sight, teleporting around blades and spells like they weren't even there. Talen was in the forefront and I saw him _burning_ demons dow, demons themselves already shrouded in green flame, his fires hotter than theirs. I was amazed, and humiliated.

I'll skip ahead shall I? To the Plateu itself? You know that the battle for the Isle was no quick in-and-out operation. The elves poured every piece of gold they had into reclaiming Quel'danas, and borrowed as much from the goblins I hear.

The prize though…Sometimes my hand still itches from the touch of it.

-xx-

It had been maybe two months? Two months and I had learned more in sixty days than the last five years of the council. All of us did. There was Freja, who when we landed could barely cast a simple ball of flame and by our departure could conjure it with barely a raised hand. Simons who could transport himself halfway across the island, instantly. Talen became a monster. We still talked every night, looking through the recoveries from the newest reclaimed house, and looking back I think with every new facet he learned he was weighing it against the man up there. I wasn't on the team that went into the terrace, but I was there when they came out, and the old sindorei was…different afterwards. An old ghost put to rest, or at least temporarily silenced. I assumed we would leave after that, but the man insisted on staying, even after half of the horde and almost all of the Alliance forces had left. He had bigger dreams, though, and darker I fear.

-xx-

They guarded it like madmen, and no wonder. From the moment I stepped across that small archway I could feel it all around us, like a thick mist, or water. I know I wasn't his first choice to accompany the team – in all honesty probably would not have gone otherwise – but we were down a member while Zinlan recovered from his wounds. I know it is not exactly…right…to say it, but I'm glad in the end, if his injury meant I had the chance to see that light.

Even filled with evil there were wonders inside, and there _was_ evil in there. I know my history but I had never expected to come face to face with so much of it. The Sunwell had been the pilgrimage of mages from times past and now I was stepping through its gardens, and I wondered who else had stepped there before me. I had little time to wonder however. Talen had spent every last part of his family's fortune to retain the best of the guilds, and they earned their keep. Dozens of them assaulted us with every cloister; demons protecting their lord's ascension, and poor twisted elves, the final forces of the mad prince who were sucking arcane power from the air and knew we were here to take it from them. And the voice all around us.

I shook with fear I won't deny it. To hear that voice was to know the name behind it, and I almost turned and ran. Only my colleagues – and dare I say it friends – by my side kept me moving forward. I think it watched us as we made our way up, past the gardens and to the great dragon. If I was afraid of the beast I was in awe of the dragon though, and I will always count it my proudest moment that he called me by name after our battle and clapped me on the shoulder. I hear he is the new Aspect, or will be soon, and I think I may call in the favour he owes, if we should meet after his ascension.

Oh? I see. No, it's a good question. I have been an academic for most of my life, but yes it is strange that my fondest memories seen to be of combat. I was enthralled, I will admit. I fought side-by-side with heroes as we felled things I'd only heard about in stories. We slew a pit-lord taller than any house in Stormwind in a battle that was over in the blink of an eye, enough magic flying through the air to annihilate a battalion of soldiers and all of it just barely enough to bring down the thing, and even then we lost people to the green fire it spat. Feadril fell there, and even while he burned he begged Talen to be buried there, in the soil below the centre of all that power.

We could have called ourselves dragonslayers by the final week of the assault, if the circumstances had not been so rotten. We fought demons and devils that I don't even care to remember now, and by the end hardly saw. The farther we went in the fiercer they became, and the more stops and pauses we took to recover and resupply, just trying to stop from being overwhelmed. I could see the enthusiasm in the faces of Talen and the other elves the closer we got the centre of the citadel. The death of Kael'thas only spurned them on I think. As if having cleanse their souls of that betrayer they wanted to recover everything they had lost. When the voice came down from above I think they welcomed it even. After the demon-lord's boastful announcement that his ascension was at hand there were no more breaks, no more stops. We burned through everything in our path like a tempest. Everything I'd learned in the last months of staying on the Isle of Quel'Danas I threw out like my life depended on it. I had arrived on the island as a neophyte, I see that now, but by the final assault on the core of the Sunwell I believe I could have matched wits and power with the Archmages and won. Not that it matters now. My arrogance was short-lived, and I carry this stump to remind me of it. We were exalted with ourselves as we punched through into the final sactum, and that was our undoing. If we had stopped and thought, or if we had been prepared better, things may have been different when we met with the god.

-xx-

I've seen the pictures of the Naaru who lives in Shattrath City and I wasn't prepared for what we found inside those walls. Freja saved us all when she called us back. Fast enough to stop that black wall of death falling on us, not fast enough to go back through, before the barriers came up. Then we were fighting for our lives. Our souls, as the battle went on. Naaru were the gods of light, but they had shadows of pure darkness and this one's shadow was very close. Close enough to reach out and touch, and certainly close enough for it to reach back, and it did, my lords it did. We were fifty when we made it into the citadel and we were barely thirty when we left, battered and bruised or worse from the mad god. I can't even say for sure whether it had died. It was a black shape, more of a symbol than a living thing, that just floated there in the room while elves and demons and nether-things came out of the walls and killed us. I…I'm sorry. I fought as well as I could but I just…so many people lost to that thing, and not even bodies to return to the family. When the ghosts vanished into the walls and the god of darkness was a core of nothing on the floor, that darkness took our fallen comrades with it. I only hope they followed the Naaru into the light.

The light, the light. I know you're not know you say you are. This is what you wanted to know isn't it? This useless stump twitches whenever I think about it and I'd swear it twitches whenever someone else is too, and it's been twitching since you arrived. But the talking helps, I seem to find, so I will continue, and then the men outside my chambers can escort you out, after we get an explanation.

I've studied devils and hellspawn. In the two months I was on that island I saw and killed even more. But that demon lord was magnificent. Yes, magnificent. Terrifying, awe-inspiring and horrible to behold, but it was a majestic, royal terror. Sometimes at night I wonder what else is out there in the nether. If the stories are true and Kil'Jaeden is only a lieutenant of the entity we call the Legion, how terrible must his master be? Standing there as the sunwell threw out black corrupted energy and with that beast clawing out of it I could only wonder how he affected the others who stood with me. I stared up into the face of hell and I was entranced. It was the _power_. It radiated from him like…I can't, there's no metaphor I can use. He threw hellfire and energy at us like he had an infinite supply, like we were a momentary distraction as he crawled out of that inferno. Freja died from it, I think, before a single lick of flame ever touched her. It seeped into her pores and burned away her mind from inside, the poor woman.

I won't relive that battle, it isn't important, to me or to you. We fought and we fought for what seemed like hours. We fought the beast and the shadows of ourselves he sent out and we fought fire itself and we triumphed. That's what all the stories say, but it isn't what was important.

The Sunwell. The word describes it perfectly and yet not at all. All my life I had sought power in books and suddenly there it was right in front of me, blazing away into the air. I could hear the talking around me, the grand speech being given, but I didn't have the sense to listen. I was across from them when it was lit and hidden from them, and maybe that's why I did it. I wanted to taste power, the level of power only given to gods and titans. I reached my hand into the Sunwell and touched that flowing energy and I was punished for it. But I won't regret it. For that second everything was laid bare to me. The past, the future, all of time and space and the knowledge of the cosmos itself. Because power is timeless.

A second was all I got, was all I could stand, before I had to withdraw. I didn't even notice it was a stump at first, the nerves themselves had been burned away so there was no pain. I lied to the others and told them I had lost it fighting the Burning Legion's commander, but I think Talon suspected. Even if he did we were closer friends by then and he forgave me my arrogance.

So, what is it you are here for? I look through you and I see no life, only an imitation. A perfect imitation but an imitation none the less. Indulge an old man soon to be at his final rest.

…

My word.

I…what _are_ you?

I see.

From the north, of course. If the heart of the world is anywhere it will be there. What would you ask of me?

…I only wish I could help you, little clockwork emissary. But the Sunwell's power stays with the Sunwell, and the visions of the future I saw stayed there also. I see why you came to me now but I am no help, I regret to say. Maybe Talen would know. His species is so much longer-lived than ours, and he may have what you seek. I will only offer you this one piece of advice, if you will go to him. Avenging his daughter has not brought Talen Lightweave peace. I would swear that mine was not the only hand that brushed the font of power on the day of our victory, and the lessons of humility and acceptance I brought from it are not the same as his. I fear whatever he saw has made him a desperate man. I've heard of his new choice of study. I think he's running from something, and dares not stop to think or it will catch him.

For it's a sin to touch the mind of god.

-xx-

RPRT:27 SNDR:FRJ4B(ML) LC:STRMWND

report failure human male no memory infestation vaccine

request attempt contact with elf hope locate cure failing cure workable weapon

-xx-

RPLY:27 SNDR:MMRN1A LC:LDR

confirm report

continue

hurry

situation deteriorating rapidly


	11. A Soul of Ice

I hate the cold. I grew up in Feralas, far away and long enough ago that I can hardly remember anything about my old life there. Not so old that I can remember the Shifting Sands or the Sundering, not long enough ago to count Staghelm or Stormrage as my comtemporaries, but compared to the company I keep now I'm old enough.

I hate the cold. I hate it so much. I'm no shrinking violet like so many of the others here, the guards who…there I go again. These are good men and women who came up here, left their families behind in the warmth of the south and came north to try and do the impossible. Now I'm mocking them like they're cowardly children forced into doing house chores, when nobody else has stepped up like they have. We elves made our own share of mistakes, and when they rose back up as demons we locked them away and forgot about them. These humans and dwarves and gnomes watched their king become a demon, and instead of hiding away they have thrown their civilisation at his gates to break them down and correct their error. Now here we are too, dragged out here north in their wake like fish being sucked in by a passing boat's wake.

Maybe it's the blood. So many of us seem to feel it. Stormrage felt it and drank enough power to drive himself mad with fury and make deals with entities nobody, mortal or immortal, should so much as glance at. Staghelm sought it out to replace the loss of his son and while he hasn't fallen yet it feels like he teeters on that cliff every day. Whisperwind's arrogance and confidence in what she had of it almost cost us a war, when we were offered help in good faith, and took it like we were doing the mortals a favour. It seems like all of elf history has the search for or holding back of power.

I feel it too, staring down on the endless fields of white and grey from the window of this necropolis. Everything is so small from up here, the soldiers and constructs below that towered over us little more than ants. Maybe we're more similar than we'd like to think, the elves and the undead. Both of us view mortals from beyond some plateau they cannot cross; us from the distance that our age gives us and them from the other side of death itself. Maybe that's why we keep underestimating them, why we elves have been content to stay on our island in our tree and be superior while the humans and gnomes and dwarves have spread across the continent. Goblins and orcs have built airships that can cross the world and all we did was scoff. Now here the undead are making the same mistake. The Lich King has looked out over his country and seen it crawling with our forces, and instead of sending the endless ranks of undead to swarm us he has sent a single fortress, one we have seen before no less. He could teach us a thing or two about hubris.

-xx-

It's a shame but there's nothing else for it, is what they told us. They had learned hard lessons from the last time Naxxramas had appeared and we were leaving nothing to chance. The corruption of one of the human's highest-ranking Archbishops, as well as the loss of almost every soldier who had worn of been exposed to the armour forged from the cursed material of the necropolis, would not be repeated. A small man, not a fighter at all but we paid attention to him as though he was a king, came and talked with us before we ascended;

_Bring nothing back. Don't listen to what you hear. Don't pick up their weapons. Don't eat or drink anything no matter how thirsty you become. Don't don't don't…_

An endless stream of rules we have to follow here. When we all met up there were older soldiers among the group that would be going in, survivors of the first attempt on Naxxramas, and to look at them you can see the caution in their eyes, in every movement they make. Every mistake they made all those years ago is coming back to haunt them, sometimes literally as ghosts or wights emerge from the walls or dark corners, and they flinch away at the face trying to reach and devour them. Friends long since mourned and forgotten. For them this is a final cleansing, no mistakes or mercy. The necromancer's soul will not be brought back this time, neither will anything else. It will be crushed here, as will everything else we find, and the citadel thrown to the ground and smashed forever, no single artefact or creature taken for study or as a trophy. The risk is too great. I disagree.

It's because they are paying so much attention to themselves and their less-experienced comrades that I have been able to disobey these rules. I have taken precautions and the Night Elve's reputation for skill and aloofness has worked in my favour, I have been left mainly to myself, just one more face in the raiding party. The inside of my robe is filled with rubbings from the walls and small sharps of metal chipped from the fallen. Nothing that could reveal itself, nothing to show from the outside. Some of these pieces are stained red with blood of those who were not as careful as they should have been, but I tell myself their sacrifice will allow the progress we will make. This will be our redemption, if all goes to plan. Nobody except the mystics of Teldrassil knows we are attempting this. Somewhere inside the walls and knowledge of the undead is power enough to make up for all these mistakes and put us back on equal footing with the younger races that have overtaken us. When I return to the south I will be a hero.

-xx-

The going is harder the farther in we go and progress as slowed to a crawl. My own pace matches them as I become more weighed down with artifacts and words stolen from the books and walls we pass. I have twice been able to pass them off as spells and equipment brought in from the outside, the pages hidden inside my books, but I feel a twinge of fear whenever the old human Vandar looks at me. He is a survivor from the first incursion, I'm sure of it, and he shows the most caution of them all. Blast it, but I cannot allow this plan to be disrupted by a single man. Ever since the fleshworks I don't think he's quite trusted me.

The fleshworks were terrifying and marvellous. I heard the stories from the royal guard and the small contacts we have within the Horde. Massive engines powered by undead magic that slaved away in the mountains to create being strong as twenty men and twice as hardy, if not exactly smart. Inside the citadel the final products were even grander, and I wonder what good works we could twist this knowledge to if only I can retrieve it. I spotted what could have been a lab or a study as we fought past the giant hounds in the depths, and I wish I could find some excuse for us to double-back there. Alas I am not in command here, just one more cog in the machine.

I will bide my time.

-xx-

He suspects something, I know it now. We have been inside for two days now, the longest of any of the squads, and when we rest we do not return to the surface, but only to the central wheel, now secured and empty. I can look through cracks in the slabs and walls down to the fields below and feel the icy cold. An hour is all I need, my man is down there in the walled town, waiting for me. But I can't get to him! Vandar suspects me clearly but not enough for him to call me out as breaking the rules. I will not allow this knowledge to be lost, burned down by people too afraid to see what lies in front of them if only they would reach out and grasp it. I have talked with some of the other lower-ranked soldiers, those who also wonder why we are not relieved, those sick of endless fighting in these stone corridors. With luck enough grumbling and we will have no choice but to return.

-xx-

The things I have seen. I hardly feel the cold now. At nights I have been reading the notes I've taken from the walls. Extraordinary. Whether these spells come from the Legion or the Lich King or someplace even darker I cannot deny their effectiveness. I've seen outlines of magic that if complete could command the undead to drop their weapons and turn on the necromancer. I know the risks and the knowledge remains safely dormant inside these pages, but a simple heating spell will surely not corrupt my mind, and we have not been down to the surface for days now. Vandar keeps us moving and fighting, and the discontent is growing I am sure. Earlier today we passed through the training grounds of the Death Knights that haunt the land below, and we lost a dozen to those frenzied creatures, some frozen to the core and left for dead, others simply stabbed and gutted. Every death I see in this place only cements my purpose here. The undead are puppets on a string, and if I can cut that string – or take the controls into my own hands – so much life can be preserved.

-xx-

Found out. Damn you old man, damn you and your cowardice! He took a small group of us out to range for the next assault and then turned to me and demanded everything I had. One of the discontents was anything but, and that plus his suspicions have been enough. He isn't fooled by my excuses, he knows the books I carry are full not with the knowledge the cover says they contain but the rubbings and notes taken from the dead citadel. I had a choice to make; hand over everything I had and be turned over to alliance command when we returned to the surface, or be killed for a traitor.

I only escaped because he thought me like any other soldier, not a trained mystic. I regret what I had to do to the man but I had no choice, this knowledge must be preserved. I have been studying and learning what I can from here and it was simple enough to do. The spell I had been using to bring warmth was in truth a spell to simply move around the cold, and I moved it all straight into the soldiers surrounding me. I ran while they were still shivering uncontrollably on the ground. I pray they get up soon, they are short-sighted but not bad men. I will double-back as much as possible, leave the citadel before they return to the gateways and be at the town and out before they suspect. Form there I do not care if they call me cultist or traitor, what I know will be safe in the great tree and from there we will work miracles.

-xx-

Unbelievable! I knew they feared the place but not so much as this. Vandar evidently recovered faster than I had hoped, and took the straight route back to the camps while I had to move around the secured outer ring of corridors. They have left, all of them, at last. Undone by my own planning, the discontents would have presented no arguments when the old man said they should leave. Whatever excuse he gave for his next step I cannot imagine but it seems that too was obeyed. The gateways outward are inactive, the green hues leading to our mounts outside locked down. I am trapped inside the citadel until the next assault is mounted.

I take it back. Those short-sighted fools. What kind of power might the Alliance have had if the humans had simply been strong enough to grasp it? The first attack on Naxxramas was a brutal mess of death and mistakes, and now we stride it's halls like we own it. If they only taken the same approach to the magic inside as well, what could we have done? I will survive this, find a way out and down and back to my home, and then the mortal races can see what true magic elves can use.

Magic, of course! Somewhere in these halls must be the keys to the gateways. Undead still swarm the surface below, there must be a way down open to them. All I need to do is search. Three wings have been cleared, the Death Knight wing is my best chance. Between my own skills and the powers I have gleaned from this place there will be an answer, if only I dare look.

Or more. I have pages in my robes, pages more memorised. Spells to command the dead and cold. What else is this citadel but bones wrapped around stone? Some power keeps this place aloft, keeps the engines of its forges and fleshworks running. If I can but find that key I can make this place my own, bring to the Alliance not just new knowledge but the fortress itself.

To hell with the humans and their overcaution, I will return in triumph. Let them make their accusations of heresy when I stride into Dalaran with Naxxramas behind me like a faithful dog. Let Vandar arrest me with an undead army at my back.

-xx-

The next team is inside, and they are hunting me. I see now my mistake. I had assumed he was afraid simply of the necropolis and the things inside. But it goes deeper than that. He is afraid of _me_ now. I went up to them when they first arrived and although they smiled at me and told me that if only I would come back down I would be given a fair chance I could see the daggers at their sides. I walked back into the shadows here and they shouted to wait, but I will not be fooled by so simple a trick.

I have found the study inside the fleshworks. Rows upon rows of books, filled to bursting. It is like a dream. I sat down to skim a page and before I noticed it the candle I used for light had burned to a nub. No matter. With what I can do now my eyes do not need light to see. The fleshworks here have parts to spare, and my old eyes are not suitable to the task at hand. If I am to bring this fortress to heel I must know everything. The food and drink inside the study is pale and tasteless compared to the inns of Dalaran but I have no mana to spare to conjure my own. I am confident I can find a solution to thirst and hunger before the meagre stores here run out. There are shelves upon shelves to read here, and the command runes I have on my hands now do well enough to keep the lesser creatures of the citadel away. Command of the will be soon, and of the greater creatures sometime after. But I am confident.

I am in this, as the humans say, for the long haul.

-xx-

It works. I am certain of it now. I attempted it against the body of one of my fallen ex-comrades and felt the power flow through the runes in my arm. The pain was harsh but manageable, and it was worth it to see the dead rise and obey. Freshly-dead, the fallen Alliance soldier must not have been under the command of Kel'thuzad, leaving me free to place my mark of ownership first. Now I have a spare pair of hands to fetch and carry while I dig deeper into the storehouse of power in this place. It is unfortunately that I must rely on the freshly-dead for my servants, but due to the assaults there are a dozen or more bodies I can use.

-xx-

I was not quick enough. Either the necromancer above has snatched them up or the teams that wander through here still clearing the necropolis are taking their dead back with them. Either way I am stuck with the few I was able to raise before my presence was noticed and countered. With few servants I will be unable to usurp the lich until-

Of, of course. How silly of me.

The answer is obvious.

-xx-

Now I have enough to make my putsch. The teams did their job well before I found them and the necropolis is mostly clear. Vandar was not among the freshly-dead, so he still hunts me. Now at least I will be able to defend myself. I no longer need to eat or drink, I cannot be starved or waited out. My miniature army is small but a good beginning. The runes course down my arms painlessly now that I have extracted the nerves I have no need for. The discolouration left behind is annoying but purely aesthetic. it is unfortunately that the original plan has fallen so far down the wayside, but soon irrelevant. Instead of taking back scraps of knowledge to my fellow mystics I will bring back a whole carcass. Instead of one cog in a large machine I will command that machine. A day or more and the final seals will be unlocked, and then we will see what the Lich King's lieutenant is truly made of. For him to make the same assault twice I doubt he is anywhere near as fearsome as the old man and his fellow survivors say he is.

-xx-

I have taken the final step. Forced to really. The trap was well-set and only my new power allowed me to escape. I did not feel Vandar's blade as he pushed it through me but the results were obvious enough. My minions beat him back and fulfilled their purpose, allowing me to slip back into the depths. I will not fall here. The threshold has been crossed now, and even in death I remain myself. I am chosen, I am convinced now. Now that the final shrouds of life have been lifted from my eyes I can see so much farther. Let Vandar have his comrades back, I no longer need anyone to face down Kel'thuzad and claim Naxxramas as my own. The grand bone dragon does not even stir as I pass. I can wave a hand and the ghouls and wights that assaulted me when I first came here step back. Only the lich ahead prevents me from assuming total control of the power inside them. The power to control death itself.

I alone shall have that power.

-xx-

The doors stand ahead of me, bone twisted and wrought like fine iron. Icy wind blasts at me from between the bars even though my body can no longer feel it. I can see shapes twisting there in the distance, as if the room beyond is massive.

Something is looking out at me. I can red eyes. This is him. The power flows out of him like black waves, washing over the undead surrounding him, seeping into their pores. The throne behind him is huge. It will be mine. I am convinced of this now. Destiny has brought me here. Has led me here to take his place.

The gate crumbles as I touch it and there is nothing between us but ice-cold air. I can see no expression on the skull, but I like to imagine there is a glint of something in those eyes? Fear maybe? Does he know I have come for him? Doe he-

I cannot move.

He is holding his hand out, beckoning, but I am frozen to the ground. I realise the gesture is not meant for me as around us the shadows fade away, replaced by huge glass panes looking out onto Northrend, and before all of them teen masses of undead. I reach out with my power and try to grasp hold of one, any of them, but his grip on them is like steel and I feel my own influence slapped away.

Icy fingers in my mind. No. It cannot end here. I was meant to be picked to come here, meant to overthrow you. Every step I took inside this place was destiny guiding me to this pinnacle of undead power, fate leading me to…

Guided? Led?

My thoughts are growing fainter, oozing through my brain like liquid growing thicker by the second, like freezing water. I fixate on the words I can still see as the ice and snow and rune-etched stone fades and all that is left of my vision is two red eyes staring into my soul. I don't feel angry or afraid anymore. I feel nothing. Strange, I spent so long learning the secrets of how to control the dead, learned as many tricks as I could from the books inside the citadel. In my hubris I forgot who wrote those books, forgot that the thing standing before me knows all those tricks, and better. The skull of Kel'thuzad grins at me as my vision fades and the strings of his power grasp and entangle me. The hand vibrates gently and I feel my body jerk forward, to join the other ranks of the undead. Vandar, old man, I feel we will meet again, and soon.

I've made a huge mistake.


	12. Prologue

The world is breaking.

I can feel it in the cracks of the stone under my feet as I walk the empty halls of the complex, in the crackle and buzz of static in the communication channels, in every breath I take of air that seems to be stagnating more and more with each second that passes me by.

Everything is different now. These silent and dusty chambers used to ring with noise and motion, when we had the power and time to spare and the masters indulged us. We had thoughts and feelings and in some cases small wishes or dreams that we kept close to ourselves. Now in these dark days while the stone and marble and steel crumble underneath us, everything we have is diverted to necessary systems. Those thoughts and dreams have been labelled as _superfluous to requirement/purpose_ and replaced with combat systems, calculating modules or simply left blank entirely, holes in our minds where life used to spark. Some do not even know what they are missing, only a small spark left to remind them that they are not whole. If they were living creatures they might have taken their own lives to remove that feeling, but we have no such freedom.

I am lucky, one of the few that requires more than simple instructions to do my job. There are a few of us left and we still talk together sometimes when our master's orders carry us by each other. My own purpose is general and tailored to our steadily-deteriorating situation, so I have an excuse to wander throughout the entirety of the inner complex, seeking out and cleansing small imperfections and intrusions. Sometimes the job takes long enough for one of my old comrades to find me, and we can talk, even if the topics are limited and depressing. The machineworks that once buzzed and hummed with a million moving parts is slower now, the automatons it puts out imperfect and prone to crazed outbursts, the metal inside them tarnished and impure. Servitors try to brush away the rust that grows ever-thicker on the walls but their own programming is flawed. They fall into gaps between the gears or mash themselves to ruin against closed doors that their faceted eyes cannot recognise as impassable. The carefully-maintained forests are falling to rot, the greenery turning from vibrant emeralds and beautiful autumn oranges to sickly dark shades and drooping leaves that compost under my feet as I walk the grass. The treants creak as they stumble around, the barks of their bodies cracking and splintering. Only a few of the dryads and more specialised creations are left to maintain that area and they are increasingly hostile and irrational. Elsewhere ice covers the cavern walls so thick and so cold it burns to the touch. The rock-servitors rumbling around slowly and clumsily, their ragged limbs occassionally coming into contact with the surfaces and tearing out, stuck there forever. Marble halls are filled with lightning so intense I cannot gain access, and the few servitors that emerge from it spit static from their bodies so powerful the rest of us give them wide berth lest an arc crackle from them to us and fry us alive. Their master has left them, gone out of the complex after his betrayal and failure, and now his thralls wander the corridors like hulking ghosts, purposeless.

We do not even try to access the depths anymore. The door has been sealed with everything the four masters working together could muster, and we have turned away from it. We are afraid. Once, weeks ago, I approached the barrier thinking I could hear something coming from behind the massive slab of runed steel. Perhaps some servant unlucky enough to have been left behind when the door came down and the lower levels were cut off from the surface complex. What I saw I could barely comprehend. My eyes are perfect machined diamond, capable of measuring down to atoms or seeing movement faster than light, but staring at that wall my sensors failed me. The metal of the door itself is rotting somehow, and seemed almost half-alive. When it was buitl we carved with as much skill and precision as we could manage, but looking at it now pattern has been twisted and warped into a giant copper face that taunts us. Some black liquid seeps from the eye-carvings and evaporates on the ground, etching and pitting the marble where it touches. I thought once to get a servitor to gather a sample for study but nobody dared approach it even on direct orders, some small fragment of self-preservation left in their programming refusing even a direct order to go near it.

Whatever personnel we left on the other side is alone now, to maintain the seals as best they can before the advancing corruption takes them. I think even as the masters sealed it up they knew it was never anything more than wishful thinking. Either some desperate attempt to ignore it and hope it would go away on its own, or a more insidious and intelligent madness that made them abandon their duties. Either way the rot at the heart of this world begins on the other side of that massive impenetrable door, and none can open it but our lords who no longer listen to reason, and certainly do not listen to us.

Something must be done.

-xx-

We stand on the cold cliffs of the Eyrie, the four out of five that still command enough importance to retain thought and free will. Loke and Orion can no longer go to their homes, kept out by the ice and thunder that would freeze or crack them if they attempted to return to their masters for new instructions. Saga is here because inside her task is done, the forests she watched over and guarded now nothing more than a collection of decaying tree-trunks and composting dirt on the ground. Kore has remained inside the clockworks, trying to tend for her master as he sits at the centre of the clockworks creating ever more bizarre and dangerous machines. I stand outside with the other three to see them on their way, and one more task to be done when they have departed.

The plan is decided. Even though her loyalty is hard-wired into her Kore has provided well for us and her creations stand with the three now. Beautiful and perfect simulacrums that will follow Loke and Orion and Saga out into the world beyond these invisible walls and into the cities of the species we've studied. They are almost indistinguishable from the real thing, they will be our eyes and ears and mouths, going where we would draw fear or hatred. We have some small fragments of information from the orbitals that we can still tease data out of, even as their connectors become corrupted and static-filled, and these readings give us our most likely targets. Loke will travel onto the landmass that still contains the dead World Tree, searching for the race that infests or worships it (we cannot tell which). Orion and Saga will head east, him to find the children under the earth that he so resembles, and her to the still-green fields of the southern hemisphere that will afford her the most cover. The plan is desperate, more of hope than certainty, but we have no other options now. We were created to serve our master's needs, and what need could be greater than this?

We know they are out there somewhere. The complexes here monitor the heartbeat of the world and more than a dozen times that heartbeat has been tapped, interrupted, diverted, or corrupted. When this happens it is the job of the masters to restore the world's pulse, to find the beings arrogant enough to think they could control it or correct the natural imbalance that threatens it. But these last few incidents, while they stayed within the complex and did nothing, that job has been completed by some other entity. Ancient gods have arisen and been driven back, old evils have emerged and disposed of, and not by us.

Between the three of them canvassing the surface they will find these creatures, gods or mortals or whatever they are, and plead with them to come north, come north and end this rotting plague.

-xx-

Above us the great dragon roars as the three set off for the long tortuous voyage down the mountains, to the cold continent beyond and finally to the sea. She screams out into the wind, massive steel-reinforced wings flapping above, as if waving them off and wishing them well. A product of the masters of steel and lightning, before one entombed himself into the clockworks and the other struck out into the mountains to stew in his own failure and loss, the proto-dragon was meant as a guard and watchdog for the complex, should the stealth-fields fail. The fields I sabotage as my friends vanish into the blizzards below.

It only takes a minute. I can feel it in my marble bones as the power flowing through the outer walls is interrupted, my teeth set on edge as the remaining force in the circuit-runes find no place to go and dissipates into the air. If any creature had been mad enough to be standing in these mountains they would watch as suddenly an impenetrable glacier faded away and was replaced by towering slabs of marble and steel, rising out of massive walls carved with ancient words and sigils. When our saviours arrive they'll see us up here, clear as day. Assuming my theories and calculations are correct and they exist. Assuming that my colleagues are successful and can find them. Assuming the complex does not fall to rot and madness in the meantime. Assuming the final watcher does not return and see the corruption and wipe it all away. Assuming so many things.

There, they're behind me now. Long ago cut free of instructions when the inner complex was sealed, I will be unrecognisable to the outer guardians, the hordes of steel automatons set to swarm should anything breach the outer walls. So be it. I leave my last wishes to my friends as they travel south, and my final thought as the hands grab me and the hammers descend is that they are successful and find our deliverers.

Find them soon.

* * *

><p>Still looking for a proof-reader. Nothing to do with why this chapter is called what it is. *Whisltes innocently*<p>

Stay tuned!_  
><em>

-Cobray


	13. A Knight of Death

Two lives now I've spent now chasing ghosts. One life in glory and hope and the next in ice and blood.

I don't remember my old name. Maybe somewhere back in the real world, where the sun still shines and shapes moving in the darkness mean birds and scavenging wildlife instead of slavering creatures and hungry ghosts, there's a wife or a mother sitting at his home wondering why their husband or son has never came home again. Maybe they still keep vigil, for a soul that no longer knows them. When we awake into our seconds lives we do not remember our first, and maybe that's for the best. I've seen it happen sometimes; a person in a crowd will see us pass and their face will change as they recognise someone they once knew. For an old comrade seeing their friend against it may be cause for a celebration to have a once-gone sword by their side again, but for a spouse or parent the reunion is not so sanguine. But I remember the last fragment of my old life. I have good reason to.

I was there at the last when the boy descended on us. We'd followed him north because we were his men. Because it was service and to us there was no greater honour than to follow our prince north chasing the necromancer that had razed half of Lordaeron – our home – to the ground and turned our people into monsters. We waited on the beaches while he and his 'trusted' men went into the dark heart of Northrend to slay the thing in its lair. We expected them to come back in glory and song, with the head of Mal'ganis on his banner. Instead he came back with swords, burned us down and ruined our road home. After that what choice did we have?

I remember it because I hate him. Maybe I was some young recruit fresh out of Stormwind's academy or maybe I was an old experienced veteran he picked by hand, I cannot see from looking at the shell I have become. Whatever I was, he gave us no option and led us to death for his own obsession and I will always hate him. There are others in the camp who feel the same way, but none such as me. Conray hates him because he destroyed his country for pride and greed, Bramford because he represents the worst of what humanity is. To Heartfield he is a symbol of everything she hates and to Vickers because he is the final loose end of a long and bloody history. But from me he took my life and soul and then put me on strings and made me dance.

_Arther will pay._

I remember they threw fruit at us when they marched us home, and worse we all knew why. If fate was kinder we might have come out from under his thrall mindless and fresh, but we all kept memories of what we had done in that black gap between our first and second lives. We had to work for it, every scrap of respect and fellowship we earned. Some of us are heroes now, but we all remember the rotten apples and oranges against us, and the looks of fear and hate in the eyes of the cities as we passed through.

We worked when we came home to the alliance. Worked our fingers to the bone and beyond. Some of us had been thralls of Arthas long enough we were known as the enemy and were just working and fighting to keep the angry mob at bay. Others spent mere days before Fordring cut our chains and only wanted to earn a new place in the world. But I worked because I knew I had been a soldier, and I knew one day we would go back. I wanted to be there. I volunteered for everything and took on every duty so one day the rollcall would go out to the guilds and the Guard and every other military house in the Eastern Kingdoms, and I would go north again.

Everything flows north here. When you make landfall from the boats you don't expect the grass, or the rolling fields. When you work your keep and go further you find things you would never have expected. A forest that rivals Stranglethorn in its lush greenery, kept alive by the magic and engines of creatures so close to being gods they might as well be from our tiny vantage point. Species that have fought and carved a niche for themselves out of the harshness of the landmass and defend it to the death. The further up you go the more you see it, the green and brown and life fades away but never entirely. Nomads and Vrykul cling to their villages in the shadow of the mountains and wind and crush anything that attempts to unseat them. Creatures that live under the ice and have adapted to reach out and devour any passing shred of warmth. Conray spent a long night telling stories of the Storm Peaks once, the halls and caverns inside the mountains filled to the brim with ancient machinery and their minders, and the corruption that had reached them.

If you live in Northrend you will change and become hard, or you will die.

-xx-

The walls tower above us and we dared not so much as touch them. We bled gallons and lost scores of men just to reach this close and yet, _and yet_ when we first came up to the first defences of Icecrown we stopped and dared go no farther. We told ourselves were gathering strength for a stronger attack, but that excuse fooled nobody. The air around Icecrown Citadel is corrupt. Sometime it catches with one of the living and you can see it run through their minds. They would close their mouths when their patrols would take them close to the walls and do anything not to breath until they were away, like the air itself would turn into a grasping hand inside their lungs and rend them apart from within. There at least I have the advantage.

We fought through halls of ice and bones, fighting off the last and best of the undead king's protectors. We battered against each other like the surf against rocks, wearing down and away at the undead and fanatical. Sometimes we'd cut down a body and instead of simply collapsing, red blood would spray out at us as one of the last of the Cult of the Damned fell before our swords. None of them tried to surrender, everyone on both sides knew it had gone too far. This was the end, either way.

There was heroism and cowardice inside, and from the unlikeliest of places. I saw a man who I had fought through the stone ziggurats of Zul'Drak with, a man who had cut down legions of the undead like they were just so many training dummies, fall to his knees and give up as his lost son came back at him with a sword in his hand and screaming death at the living. We woke one morning before the final push to find a guard dead in his tent, his own sword through his throat rather than face the things inside the walls of the undead citadel. An armourer who had only ever held weapons to check for impurities and faults took up his own forged blades and hacked his way through a squad that had slipped through the defences, and a boy no older than seventeen who had lied about his age to join a guild smashed in the skull of a thrall threatening his fallen brother. Some vanished in the night, and still others walked days through the snow and ice to join us. They were people like me, people whose obsession and hatred drove them to make the long journey north just for one crack at the lord of the undead, and if they survived the journey to the gates we found jobs for them all. The father of one of the soldiers came north that way, n man into his seventh decade who had walked, begged and rode his way over half a world to be with his son on the eve of victory over undeath. For different reasons neither of them left that place alive, but even now I'm certain neither of them regretted it. There is a graveyard outside Icecrown Citadel, dug so far into the ground nothing could ever rise from it, of those who died at the walls and now act as eternal sentries for it.

We moved around them like cold smoke, without feeling or pity. I knew some still suspected us, even after the final lich-queen fell, but nobody paid them any attention. Everyone was desperate, us and them. The living felt a tension like knives in their back as they thought about what would happen if they failed, and we free dead thought about the endless shroud that would fall across our minds once more if the Lich King stayed on his throne. We knew if we failed and the undead covered the world there would be no more lucky breaks, no third life. We would only know darkness forever in service to the black king, and this was unacceptable to us.

-xx-

We saw mad things before the summit. Poison and rot and corruption given form and voice and minds by a mind even Sylcanas' finest alchemists would never be able to match. Rooms where we found ourselves locked in, fighting against figures already half-dissolved and still attacking us, as hissing green liquid ate away at our boots. We lost some there, their bodies moving lifelessly inside a soup of poison and dissolved flesh as we fought against the insane grinning thing that had created them, laughing like a hyena as he downed his own concoctions and tried to crush us in a dozen claws hands and sucking tentacles. Arthas made sure there would be no surrender or deals to be made as he locked off his throne and kept the seals within the bodies of his final guards. The 'doctor' died for the final time, and we gathered up all the corpses of his creations and threw them down the central pits, deep into the bowls of the citadel's caverns.

We lost fewer to the pale humans, but their ends were slower, and worse. I watched as some of party were taken away from us, coming back as we walked the corridors as red-eyed ghouls or simply drained dry and their corpses put into our path. Red silk curtains that reminded me of stories of Black Temple survivors, and beautiful things we could see from the corners of our eyes that begged for us to save them. We held back as many as we could but the ones who went off to find and rescue those ghosts never came back, eaten by the citadel and lost forever. Perfume and cologne wafted the halls, so thick you could nearly see the clouds. By the time we reached the vampire-lieutenants the living were crazed with madness or lust or hatred, and when the clouds finally cleared we found ourselves not in a beautifully-ornate harem but inside a stone room, the floor sticky with the blood and corpses of those who had been too late to realise they were in an abattoir and not a paradise. Their queen was no less bewitching to mortal eyes. Some refused to fight, others were unable to, just staring in wonder or lust. Those who overcame the poisonous perfume around here were greeted with tearing teeth and claws, and magic that stripped the flesh from their bones or set them alight with black fire and melted their armour around them. I saw only a slavering ghoul dressed in expensive rags that lashed out and tore flesh with every movement. I asked Kozrin when we left what _he_ had seen, and the Draeni had just shook his head._ A beautiful thing, my friend. I am lucky you were there, or I may have been lost._ The blue-skinned aliens were always good to us. Maybe it was their outsiders perspective that let them be so, but I never knew them to be blinded by the (understandable) hatred that humans felt for my kind. I do not know if they believe in an afterlife like we humans do, but if there is one I hope he reached it safe and well.

-xx-

All the days we drove through the halls and pits and endless heights he taunted us and tried to drive us apart. When the horde faced us down outside the walls I almost thought it had worked. I was on the ship and I looked across and saw other Death Knights loyal to the Horde, and if our eyes met I could see the look in them, the same one my own eyes surely had: _What a waste._ Luckily that was the only time we came so close to destroying ourselves. Some agreement was made by those below, some acknowledgement that Horde and Alliance together would drive each other to destruction, and from then on the citadel was ours to take. There was no way down after that, while they repaired the Skybreaker, and but for the dragon's help we might have starved up there. We undead stayed out of sight after we freed the great green drake. Dragons have no love for the undead, of any form, no matter what allegiance they hold. But she was grateful enough to call her brood to give aid to the living that made up the bulk of the forces in the upper citadel, dropping food and parcels.

I found my own kind in that hall. The endless bone-drakes that flew in the sky above the citadel and killed anything living in the air were made there; dragons born undead through black magic. I walked the halls alone one night as the living slept and saw them, tiny creatures no bigger than my hand but already corpses, unnatural things born without souls or life but still reaching out to my hand to squeak and beg for food. Some of them were taken away to be studied by the Kirin Tor and I promised myself that after this war is ended, if I survive, I will go and see them. The undead have trouble with the beasts that the living use to navigate the skies. Gryphons and drakes and other animals shy away from our touch and try to buck us off when we mount them. Maybe these things made of bone and leathery wings will be a better if morbid solution.

Maybe then Arthas' own steed is a cautionary tale against such a dream though. We fought against a sheer drop and many fell to their deaths there, plucked from the battlements by razor-sharp talons and thrown out to fall to their deaths. The ancient undead wrym taunted us endlessly as she whipped up storms of ice that drained the heat from our bones and froze solid what remained. Even now some of us remain up there, entombed until the winds and snow end and the blocks they are trapped inside melt away, if such a thing is ever possible. By the end we couldn't see each other, just a wall of white and somewhere inside it a massive beats of teeth and claws and tail that we tried desperate to chip away at like an ice sculpture, cold blue eyes staring out at us as the water froze over our eyes. In the end we lost a dozen and were grateful it was not more.

Even now we are not certain it is truly dead. The wind is too strong and we had to crawl back inside the citadel on our hands and knees, those unlucky enough to touch the ground with bear skin feeling it ripped away as they moved. Maybe it is still there, a spirit trapped forever inside a collection of bones, unable to ever gather itself together. Maybe that is a fitting punishment.

-xx-

We are here because he is our cross to bear. Arthas Menethil was a human being before he was an undead king, and it seems fitting the final assault be made by those who he wronged most: humans and dwarves and elves and gnomes. Maybe there was some point in his past that he could have been changed, some missing test or hardship that would have allowed him to resist the call of the Lich-lord inside Frostmourne and shatter the blade instead of taking it up. Maybe he could have been the true King that old man Uther said he would be. But that point is years in the past and no longer matters. The king that sits above us now on his throne of ice and rock rules over nothing but the dead, and creates nothing but misery for his people.

The wind bites at us here at the top of the world, almost a living thing that tries to grip at our skin and armour and tear it off, or grip our throats and throw us from the spire onto the sharp and bladed stones miles below. Everyone is shivering, even we dead, as the cold slides into our bodies like a long blue knife. Blood may not flow through our veins like it does the living, but it is still there inside us and it feels like with every movement I make it cracks and freezes inside my body.

I still move. I still remember that day when the young prince came back to the shores with his 'trusted' men – more fanatics and mad dogs than true soldiers at that point – and burned us away rather than admit that Mal'Ganis had outsmarted him. Maybe the sword had gotten to him even then, and picking it up out of the ice was just a courtesy, a final confirmation that the royal line of Menethil was finally at an end, brought to it's grave by a petty and obsessed boy so far out of his depth he would never see the surface again. I look up at that creature now and wonder whether the blood in _his_ veins is warm or cold. Either way by the time this day ends I will feel it across my hands as my blade cuts into him.

We are here, now. The best. We have fought through everything the world has thrown at us. Through ancient troll gods and old tings from beyond time. Through cultists and men that called themselves unkillable and yet still died begging for their lives. Through the final walls of zombies and ghouls that Arthas had to throw at us, and every time we broke through the other side stronger. Men and women who have cut their way through the heart of Arthas' empire of death and now stand here with their swords and arrows and magic pointed at his heart, and I am one of them. Tirion Fordring stands with us, a man who brought me out of the darkness and gave me my second life. People who have survived lords of fire and black dragons and demonic creatures. We stand here at the summit of the world, the living and the dead side-by-side. There are those back in the south who have never stood with us, who say that the Death Knights are just pale simulations of those we were. That we are just random sparks of movement playing out with the limbs and brains of fallen warriors. I know that those who I have fought with on this cold world disagree. We've celebrated and laughed together and cried and carried out friends to their rest. Some of us have even loved. We feel just as they do, and now standing before the king of the undead I am proud to have done so.

When his spirit would appear to us in the continent below, to taunt and brag and cajole us as we fought and killed his minions, he liked to brag to us that death was a superior and inevitable force that would lay low the greatest warriors. Arthas said that in the end death would rule.

Now here I am to prove it to him.

* * *

><p>x-x-x<p>

I skipped Trial it's true because I couldn't really think of anything good enough. If anyone wants to take a shot you're welcome to.

Glad to see people are reading, I'd be lying if I said I didn't get a kick out of seeing people enjoying something I wrote. As always comments and critisism are welcome.

Looking for a proofreader for a new story I'm working on. If anyone's interested shoot me a PM!

~Cobray


	14. A Cup of Wine

So you're back again. Knew you would be eventually. Here, lemme draw one for you, on the house. No, I insist. There's precious few of the old crowd left these days to appreciate it.

Open? Of course, rain or shine. Rain or shine or bloody great stones of fire raining down from the sky. God, what a sight. Did you see it? Sounded like the world was ending.

Almost finished your little scroll huh? I have to tell you love it looks like you're damn near done in yourself. I remember the first time you came in here, all smiles and sunshine. Now you look like you've been through the wringer, if you don't mind me saying so. Still it's a treat love, I wondered whether you made it through. Knew you went north, thought maybe that one would do for you. Journalists huh?

Yeah, he came through, along with most of the others that lived. Gods and all but I've never been prouder to have someone drinking my beer, in my own pub. He sat and talked for a bit and then left, and nobody I asked knew where they went. Maybe they were ghosts, or angels or something. Maybe they just wanted one last look at home before they went out again. Imagine that story in your little paper.

Take a seat lass, and listen.

-xx-

It's strange with the new breed, and the lad was one of them. It's like they're resigned but they don't care so much. So long as they can get their job done it doesn't matter if they fall during it. Seems silly, they have their whole lives ahead of them and instead they're going to go all the way up there and throw 'em against the tide, but nobody was complaining. Nobody. Especially not me.

The chain's new, since last time you were here. Take a look. The ring was hers, all I have left really. We were in Theramore, on holiday. First bloody holiday in years. I saw it happen. Like the heavens opened and instead of angels and light there was just fire, fire and that bloody screaming melting thing pouring across the land and dragging hurricanes after it. She'd went out to the docks for a morning walk and I almost got to her before it hit, almost. A few inches between us and I'm thrown through the air and suddenly I'm upside down in a tree while the ocean just…came up. Like the whole bloody world suddenly decided to drop a few feet down, and then changed its mind and came back up but not all the way. She didn't come back up with it. Maybe she got caught on a rope or something, I…a couple of times feeling the bottom I thought I had her, but in the end there wasn't nothing I could do. Kept the ring though.

Gods you should have seen us when they came in. Everyone cheering and trying to slap them on the back (poor bloke must have had a damn sore back before he left) and free drinks for all of them. We had a party. One of the regulars suggested they all go into Stormwind together, up onto the ramparts where the huge bastard's claws were still marking the stone, and raise up a flag. He didn't though, and that's when he got to talking.

It was over for him, you could see it when he talked. With the others – and I've had some of the big ones in my pub as you know – they want to get back out there, all of them. It ain't bloodlust I think, they just love the rush. But this man was done. He had a sword over his back, all wrapped up in cloth and _chains_, and it was the strangest bloody thing I ever saw. Kept trying to get away from him, looked like. I asked him what it was and he told me.

_It's him. The last bit of him maybe._

I was a little bit afraid I'm not gonna lie. That close to even a little piece o' the great dragon and I was shivering. I asked him what he was going to do with it.

_Throw it off the edge of the world._

I could never keep my mouth shut, you know that lass if you've known me long enough. When they come in some want to talk and others just want to drink and I always wheedled the stories out of them in the end, but I didn't want to do that with this one. He was a bloody hero. Maybe the last one. So I just asked if he wanted to talk about it, then poured us a couple of drinks and listened while he did so.

He'd lost someone alright, just like the rest of us when the earth cracked. A mother or a sister, gone up in flames with Redridge. Wasn't even during the thing itself, they were just in the wrong place at the wrong time when Deathwing flew over, and that was that. Next day he went and signed up to the first guild that would have him and went off north, like everyone else. Going north isn't like it was, not with the old Lich King gone. Oh don't get me wrong it's still bloody dangerous, but at least the entire bloody continent isn't actually watching you personally and trying to murder you. But of course you know that.

He talked about dragons a lot. To be honest I think he might have been more than a little smitten with one of 'em. That never ends well – look at that mess with the Blackflight – but I wasn't going to comment. He went on for a bit about some emerald lass, and I don't mean the colour of her eyes. Anyway he went up there, threw himself into any job they gave him. it's empty now, just mages there (just the way those magical buggers like it) but back then Dalaran was packed to the gills. He stood out though, he said. Made people notice him. Did some work for the Crusade, with that crazy bastard Nesingwary, apparently did something in the mountains too with the Irregulars. Made his mark though and just in time. To be honest with you I wonder if when he went up there he wasn't doing it for the world anymore but for his little dragon girl. Wouldn't be the first, but let's say no more of that.

_It was a massacre_, he said, and I believed it. Hundreds from the guilds went up there for the assault and not a handful made it back. They'd come through the pub on the way out and you could see some of them were dead boots walking. When the man came in he had maybe ten people with him. Out of hundreds. Well they might not have made it back but by the gods we'll not forget. Everyone knows where they were when the thing went down. Like the sky suddenly got a little lighter, or the rain stopped, or whatever people say. He paid for every life he took. I know it ain't exactly according to scripture but by god if there's a Light we go to when we die there must be a Dark for the rest, and I hope the scaly lizard is soaking down there right now.

He didn't really talk about the place itself. I reckon you've been there yourself right? Yeah, I've seen drawings. Must be quite a sight just on its own. Well from the way he was talking about, it it must have been something else. Dozens of dragons – the good kind – fighting against everything Deathwing had. He talked about things that were half-real and half-alive, a giant dragon tall as the castle that dragged them all into some half-shadowy place and made them fight in freezing darkness, like being underwater.

He talked about…ah damnit all I don't even know what he was trying to describe. Something with more eyes than limbs, and strange colours that danced across some big living chamber that burned or froze or gutted whatever touched them. It sounded like the dragon threw everything it had against them, the last few groups to get inside the temple, and up top to try and bring it down.

I never liked orcs. I know your generation are different lass and maybe that's how it should be, but I still remember the raiders that'd come at night and take people and crops away, as slaves or tribute. I would pour a drink for that warchief though and that's the best thing I've ever said about a troll. Makes you think what could have been if there was some way to get them on our side. Yeah, yeah, I know, but old thoughts die hard right? I'm just an old man, ignore me. He did good though for an orc. Got the impression the man thought so too. There's a sight I would have liked to see I tell you that; the look on his face when that _thing_ hit him square on. You know they chained up a bit of the armour back behind the lake and you can see the bloody great gouge across it. A couple of the blacksmiths did a thing and tried to crack it with their best stuff, and didn't even leave a dent. Must have been a powerful bloody thing, to take him down like that.

After? No, he didn't talk much about the rest. Got the impression maybe he couldn't. He spoke a little bit, just staring into his beer. Everything coming together; humans, elves, dragons, everyone, and above them all just a giant _thing_ blocking out the sun, and the sea and sky cracking around them as he tried to finish what he started while they tried to stop him for good. Ten came back here. Maybe a few more that didn't come to the pub with him, but he must have seen a lot of friends go down. All the time he's talking he's got that sword next to him and he keeps looking at it all wrapped up, like he's keeping an eye on it. He said he was going to find the edge of the world and then throw the thing off, and I wish him luck you can believe that. Maybe then everything will be done and gone, and all those old ghosts can rest in peace like they're meant to.

Now? Now we're just getting back to normal love. Guess you can say the same for yourself?

Yeah, of course. That was _it_ of course, no reason for you to be back here otherwise I guess. Nothing else left now, you can tell. It's strange really. Back all those years ago when I had still hair that wasn't grey the kids would all come into the pub and complain there was nothing to do. Then the firelords rose up and that started it all. Seems like ever since it was one thing and another. Men and women just going off into a meat-grinder, keeping us all safe for a year or two until the next bastard came along and thought he could be a god or a king or whatever madness they had. Now the kids are back in here again already, whining that all the work's been done. Sitting around complaining about people like that man who did the work without leaving them anything left they can make a rep on. Years ago I might have kicked them out for something like that, disrespect. Now I don't mind so much, just so long as those kids are still here in the real world and not out there, in magical plains of fire or the freezing bloody north dying by the dozen. They can complain about farming all they like, I don't mind it a single bit.

So what about you lass? What's your plan now there's no more battles to search out, no more heroes to corner? …Hmmm. Sounds interesting at least, I'll give you that. Tell you what, come around when you next head out and we'll talk about old times. I know it's a little louder now than it was then, but that's just because of the kids over there. Farmer's kids and that's what they'll stay as. Not going off and getting themselves killed against some firelord, mad dragon, crazy half-god or rotten undead creature. Sure it's a little louder in the pub now, but like I said I don't mind that. Don't mind it at all. It was fun lass. Like I said, pop around next time you're by and we'll shoot the breeze some more. First beer on the house.

See you around.

* * *

><p>-xx-<p>

And done.

Thanks for sticking around for this little experiment. There were a few rough patches but I came away with some lessons and I'm glad people seeemed to (mostly) enjoy it. I'm already working on something new, a little more regular and a lot longer than this. If anyone is interested in getting a sneak-peek I'm still in the market for a proof-reader. It's already shaping up to be pretty good, I think you guys might like it.

As usual feedback is always welcome.

Watch this space.

~Cobray


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